Full Lake, Broken Staircase: What This Summer Did to the Cibolo Trail

Walk the boardwalk behind Main Plaza on a Saturday morning this month and you'll notice something that doesn't quite add up. Boerne City Lake is sitting higher than most residents have seen it in years. A few miles south, at the Cibolo Nature Center, a section of the Woodlands Trail is still missing its handrail, and the staff are asking for volunteers to help put the preserve back together.

Both of those things happened because of the same water. Understanding how a full lake and a wrecked trail came out of one summer, on one creek, is the difference between reading Boerne's water year correctly and just noticing that things look different lately.

One Creek, Two Signals

Boerne City Lake and the Cibolo Nature Center sit on the same waterway, a few miles apart, and this summer the creek gave each of them a completely different kind of event within about a month.

The lake's turn came first. Between June 14 and June 22, the water level at Boerne City Lake climbed from 29 feet 3 inches to 39 feet 1 inch, a rise of 9.8 feet in eight days. City officials called it the third-largest one-week increase recorded at the lake in the past 26 years, trailing only the July 2002 flood (23.5 feet in a week) and the May 2015 flood (nearly 18 feet in three days). Parks and Recreation Director Lissette Jimenez said the department was glad to head into summer with the lake looking that good, and for anyone who fishes, paddles, or just likes the view from the dam, it was the best news the lake had gotten in a long stretch of drought.

Three weeks later, the same creek did something else entirely. On July 15, Cibolo Creek at the nature center surged from 3.5 feet to 22.63 feet in a matter of hours, the highest level recorded at the preserve since at least 2015. The water climbed all the way to the top of the Nature Center's 24-step staircase on the Woodlands Trail and left fish stranded along the walking paths as it receded.

Two events, one creek, a few weeks apart. The reason they can happen back to back has to do with how small this watershed actually is. The Upper Cibolo Creek drainage above the dam covers just 19.5 square miles, entirely inside Kendall County. A creek that size can go from placid to record-setting in an afternoon if the rain lands in the right two or three square miles of it, and it can just as easily miss a storm sitting a mile away. Ryan Bass, the city's environmental program manager, put it plainly after the June rise: "Significant rises in lake levels depend on rainfall occurring in the right places throughout the watershed." The same logic explains the July flood. It wasn't a bigger storm than the region has seen. It landed somewhere that mattered.

What You'll Actually Find on the Trail This Week

If you haven't walked the nature center trails since mid-July, here's what's different and what isn't.

The Cibolo Nature Center's own trail system covers more than six miles across five ecosystems, most of it built around four named routes:

• Marshland Trail – the ADA-accessible boardwalk loop through the reclaimed marsh
• Woodlands Trail – the shaded oak-and-juniper path along the creek, home to the 24-step staircase the July flood submerged
• Cibolo Creek Trail – the route that follows the creek itself past cypress trees, turtles, and bass
• Native Texas Prairie Trail – the restored tallgrass prairie loop, maintained partly through controlled burns

Cooper's Crossing, the designated creek crossing near the middle of the property and one of the most photographed spots on site, took the brunt of the flow. The Cibolo Center has said it plans to spend the coming weeks documenting exactly how the flood reshaped the property and organizing volunteer days to help with the cleanup, so expect to see work crews or naturalist staff out on the trails through the fall.

None of this touches the separate city-run Cibolo Trail, the paved path that runs 1.75 miles from the Waterworks Terrace trailhead behind Main Plaza to the City Park trailhead near the municipal pool, then continues another 1.4 miles south toward Herff Falls for just over three miles total. That stretch, including the 150-foot pedestrian bridge over the confluence of Cibolo and Currey Creeks, came through the summer in its usual condition. If your daily walk stays on the paved downtown trail rather than heading into the nature center itself, you likely haven't noticed a thing.

Dogs are still welcome on both trail systems, on leash, same as always. The dinosaur tracks near the Boerne Lake spillway, the Acrocanthosaurus footprints a 1997 flood first uncovered, are also unaffected. Those replicas are cast in place at the trailheads and have outlasted every flood since.

Why the Restrictions Haven't Moved

Here's the part that trips people up. The lake looks better than it has in years, and yet Boerne is still under Stage 2 Water Restrictions, which have been in place since August 7, 2023, and still limit lawn irrigation to one day a week.

That's not bureaucratic inertia. A small, flashy watershed like this one can deliver a nine-foot rise in a week and still not resolve a multi-year drought, because a single wet month doesn't refill the groundwater the way it fills a reservoir. The lake responds fast. The aquifer underneath it does not. Until the city's underlying supply picture changes, the restriction stays exactly where it is regardless of how the lake looks from the dam.

If you're on Boerne Utilities water and haven't checked which day of the week is yours, this is a good moment to look it up. It hasn't changed since 2023, and the full lake doesn't mean it's about to.

The Fall Calendar Doesn't Wait for the Creek to Decide

None of this has slowed down what's on the calendar. If anything, the next few weeks are some of the busiest of the year for anyone who spends time on or near the water in Boerne.

The Kendall County Fair returns for its 120th year over Labor Day weekend, September 4 through 6, at the Kendall County Fairgrounds on River Road, with the parade running through downtown Saturday morning. That same evening, September 4, the city is also holding a Family Night Hike at the Cibolo, one of the guided after-dark walks it runs periodically through the nature center's trail system, so residents choosing between the fairgrounds and the creek that weekend have two very different but very Boerne options.

Later in the fall, the Hill Country Animal League brings its Tails on the Trail fun run to the Cibolo Creek trail, a 1K to 3K that doubles as a fundraiser for the shelter, followed in October by Barktoberfest at Main Plaza, the group's Oktoberfest-themed dog costume contest and adoption event. Both make more sense once you've seen the creek up close this year. The animal league's programming leans hard into the same waterway that spent the summer swinging between drought relief and flood documentation, and the fun run route will take participants past at least some of the same ground the July flood reshaped.

What It Means for Your Next Walk

If your routine includes the nature center, expect a few more staff and volunteers on the trails through the fall as recovery work continues, and keep an eye out for updated signage near Cooper's Crossing and the Woodlands Trail staircase. If your routine stays on the paved Cibolo Trail downtown, nothing about your Saturday changes. Either way, the lake is worth a look right now. It won't stay this full without more rain, and the same small watershed that filled it in eight days can just as easily let it slide back down over a dry month.

The short version: this wasn't a good year and a bad year on the same creek. It was one watershed, doing what a 19.5-square-mile drainage does when the rain lands where it lands, twice, three weeks apart.

If you're curious what else is changing around Boerne this season, or you're weighing a move here and want a read on the neighborhood from someone who actually walks it, Meghan Pelley can talk you through it.