Kendall County is about to get a new park in a particularly scenic part, just south of the tiny town of Sisterdale, north of Boerne. The Cibolo Center for Conservation's Carolyn Chipman Evans said the pressures of Hill Country growth make this park an important one.
“Sisterdale is about 13 miles from Boerne, up Highway 1376, or Sisterdale Highway. It's still a little tiny burg, as it looks much like it did 100 years ago,” Chipman Evans said. “And this piece of property is at the entrance into the community. And so not only is it a special piece of land, but it will also protect the community from having a gas station at their entrance corridor. So it's a really special thing.”
Thirty-two prime acres of the Texas Hill Country have now been preserved for all time with the efforts of quite a few people.
“We were able to raise the funds along with the Jeanie Rabke Wyatt Family Foundation, and they were able to help us, along with the other landowners, to purchase this original 22 acres,” she said.
Contiguous to that acreage were another 10 prime acres.
“And then Trey Rabke and his wife, Angela, donated an additional 10 acres to that so we now have a 32-acre preserve that we call a sanctuary,” she said.
The sanctuary property is a mix of woodlands and previously farmed bottomland, with Sister Creek running right through it.
“It's on both sides of the creek. And it's got these beautiful big bluffs and big fields and cypress-lined creek, and it's just a real sweet piece of property,” she said. “And what we're hoping to do is to create a friends' organization just for Sisterdale Sanctuary.”
That friends' organization will largely determine the pace of the park’s opening, plus the nature of what the park will eventually be. Envisioned at this point as being more of a sanctuary than a nature center—they likely won’t build buildings—it will retain its rustic status with mainly walking trails and other light amenities.
“Exactly. And we just completed a wildlife management plan, and we intend to start doing workdays out there coming up in the spring, and those will be posted on the Cibolo Center for Conservation website, when those workdays will start to happen,” Chipman Evans said.
Fencing the property, plus plotting and building trails will occupy the next couple of years before it opens to the public. Preserving this land also helps protect the Guadalupe River watershed.
