Between Big Stacy and Little Stacy, Travis Heights Is Walking on an Old Volcano

Most mornings, someone crosses the East Side Drive bridge in Travis Heights on their way from Little Stacy Park to Big Stacy Park, passes under the shadow of one of Austin's remaining moon towers at Leland Street, and keeps walking without giving the ground beneath them a second thought. The trail surface changes from concrete to crushed granite. A creek runs alongside. None of it looks unusual, because none of it is meant to.

What that walker is actually crossing is the remains of an extinct volcano. Blunn Creek, the water running beside the trail the whole way, cuts through soil described by the preserve's own historians as silty clays and clay loams sitting over weathered chalk and limestone, the kind of ground that erodes easily and needs almost constant attention to hold its shape. The creek is named for Joseph Blunn, an Austin resident who was caught in a flash flood along it in a horse and buggy back in October of 1879. The water has been doing this a long time.

A Short Loop With Two Endpoints and a Longer Story Behind It

The walkable stretch most Travis Heights residents know is short, a little over a mile round trip, linking Little Stacy Park on the north end to Big Stacy Park on the south. Along the way it passes over one bridge and under another, the second one built with enough of an angular flourish that longtime trail guides have taken to calling it "the Frank Lloyd Wright bridge," though there's no evidence Wright had anything to do with it. The path ends at a marked "Turnaround" waypoint next to Travis Heights Elementary, where parking runs tight because of the pool crowd nearby.

That short loop is really a doorway. It connects to a much larger, wilder piece of ground a short distance upstream: the roughly 40-acre Blunn Creek Nature Preserve near St. Edward's University, where a spur trail called the Volcano Overlook gives the neighborhood's volcanic backstory an actual name on a map. The preserve became public land in 1972, after Jean Mathers and the Travis Heights Neighborhood Organization, the group now known as South River City Citizens, pushed the city to buy back land a developer had purchased twenty years earlier with plans to build condominiums along the creek. A decade later, in September 1982, Austin voters approved a bond that put $1.8 million toward preserving and maintaining it, a proposition that reportedly drew record turnout for a city vote at the time.

The Canopy That Wasn't Supposed to Look Like This

None of that history is visible on an ordinary walk, and neither is the preserve's more recent problem. Before a coordinated restoration effort began, non-native trees made up roughly 80 percent of the tree canopy inside Blunn Creek Nature Preserve, according to Landmark Wildlife Management, the wildlife contractor brought in to help fix it. The dominant invader was ligustrum, joined by Chinaberry, Chinese privet, and nandina, all species that crowd out the native shrubs and grasses that would otherwise hold the creek's erosion-prone soil in place.

David Todd, who helps with funding and planning for the Blunn Creek Partnership, the informal neighbor group that organizes much of the ongoing work, put it plainly: "Restoring Blunn Creek Nature Preserve has been a work in progress for a number of years thanks to volunteers and City of Austin personnel." The Partnership doesn't work alone. Its efforts run alongside South River City Citizens, the Austin Parks Foundation, Keep Austin Beautiful, and Landmark Wildlife Management, a coalition that treats the preserve less like a park and more like an ongoing restoration project that never fully finishes.

One volunteer in particular has become something of a fixture. Jerry Levenson, known within the group as the Ligustrum Liquidator, spends hours at a time cutting down the larger non-native trees so the mulched material can be redistributed along the trails, where it helps control erosion and returns organic matter to the soil. The Partnership holds a standing volunteer day on the first Saturday of every month, from 8:30 a.m. to noon, meeting at 1200 St. Edward's Drive. It is open to anyone willing to show up with gloves.

The Pool at the End of the Loop Runs on Its Own Calendar

Big Stacy Pool, the anchor at the south end of the loop, tells a version of the same story from a different angle. Built during the WPA era and opened in 1937, the six-lane, 33-yard pool is heated by natural well water and stays open year-round, one of the only public pools in Austin that is both heated and free of charge. Depths range from about 3.5 feet to more than 9 feet at the deep end.

That year-round openness isn't automatic either. Earlier this year, Big Stacy closed along with several other city pools following a February winter storm, and reopened on April 6, 2026, according to Community Impact reporting at the time. Then, on a more predictable schedule, the pool closed again from May 9 through May 17, 2026, for its annual spring cleaning and maintenance, timed so it would be ready for the crowds arriving ahead of Memorial Day. The spring cleaning closure was planned around a simple reality: a pool built nearly ninety years ago needs regular, deliberate upkeep to keep functioning the way people expect it to.

That is the throughline running the length of the loop. The bridge that looks handmade, the trail surface that shifts from pavement to gravel, the pool that always seems to be there when you want it, none of it holds its shape without someone scheduling the work. The preserve doesn't drift back toward wildness on its own any more than the pool refills itself. A neighbor group meets on a set Saturday every month specifically because the alternative is a creek bank thick with ligustrum inside a few growing seasons. The volcano under Travis Heights did its work millions of years ago. Keeping what grew on top of it looking the way it does now is a job someone in the neighborhood has taken on, one Saturday at a time.

If you're curious how a neighborhood's small, unglamorous maintenance habits shape the way it lives day to day, that's the kind of detail worth paying attention to before you ever look at a listing. The Alwan Group spends a lot of time in the parts of Austin that don't show up in a search filter. Let's Connect.