Trails & access

What it is

The result is a cleared line from one point on the tract to another. Width depends on the use. A foot path can stay narrow. A truck needs room to pass and turn. Mulch left on the lane is cover. It is not a road surface.

When a landowner needs it

It fits when brush has closed the way to a gate, a barn, a tank, the back fence, or a future homesite. Opening a whole pasture is pasture reclamation or brush clearing. A trail can be one piece of a larger job, with its own marks. The lane should reach a place you use.

Process and machines

Walk the route. Mark the edges, the trees that stay, and the low spots that should stay out of the cut. The clearing is commonly done with a skid steer or compact track loader and a forestry mulching head, working along the marked line. Steep rock can stop the route even when the brush is small.

What changes the price

Length, width, brush density, slope, rock, and the number of trees to work around all change the hours. A route that bends is slower than a straight push through brush. Turnarounds and creek approaches add time.

Season

A trail that clips oak limbs or skins trunks is an oak wound. Keep that work out of February through June when the route can wait, and paint wounds immediately when it cannot.

Do not wound oaks from February through June. Sap beetles that spread oak wilt are most active then, and a fresh cut is how the fungus gets in. Paint every oak wound immediately, in any month. Texas A&M Forest Service counts land clearing and cedar clearing as wound sources, the same as pruning. Texas Oak Wilt sets the window as February 1 through June 30 and includes fresh stumps and damaged roots.

Mulching leaves chips on the ground. If that material is piled to burn later, a county burn ban can stop the burn. A county judge or the commissioners court sets the ban, and Texas A&M Forest Service posts a statewide map of which counties are under one.

On the Edwards Plateau, golden-cheeked warblers nest in juniper-oak woodland. They return in early to mid-March, lay eggs in April, and leave from late June to mid-August. If the tract is that woodland, look at the calendar before opening it in spring.

Hill Country and South Texas ground

A Hill Country lane crosses the shallow limestone and Ashe juniper of the plateau. A lane in Guadalupe or Wilson County crosses the sand or clay of the Post Oak Savannah. A Medina County lane can pass mesquite, huisache, and prickly pear. Keep the route out of a channel. Low ground is a floodplain question for the town, and the lane approaches a creek instead of cutting a new ditch.

Kendall, Bandera, and Comal counties sit on the Eastern Edwards Plateau: shallow soil over limestone, with Ashe juniper, honey mesquite, Texas red oak, and yaupon. Ashe juniper is the tree people call cedar. Guadalupe and Wilson counties are Post Oak Savannah, oak woodland and grassland on sand and clay. Medina County is South Texas Plains, where the brush is mesquite, acacia, and prickly pear. Huisache (Acacia farnesiana) is on the South Texas browse list, and it sprouts again on disturbed ground. The town pages describe the soils in each place.

What the land looks like afterward

A walking line and a truck line are marked at different widths. The opened lane has mulch and the marked trees beside it. A low spot is flagged on the walkthrough. Mesquite sprouts from a buried crown if only the top is cut, so a mulched stem can grow back. Follow-up is part of keeping a field open.