Terry Hershey Park

Terry Hershey Park — 496 acres of bayou that one woman refused to let them pave

A long green ribbon through west Houston: over eleven miles of trail strung along roughly six miles of Buffalo Bayou, ten bridges, dense stands of pine and oak, and a network of volunteer-built dirt singletrack on the south bank. The park exists because Terese “Terry” Hershey spent five years fighting the Army Corps of Engineers to stop this stretch of bayou from being straightened into a concrete ditch — and won.

Highlights

• The unchannelized bayou — this is what Buffalo Bayou looks like when it was not turned into concrete: sinuous banks, undercut curves, sandbars and standing timber, all of it preserved by a citizens’ campaign that ran from 1967 to 1971.
• Eleven-plus miles of trail — a paved asphalt spine roughly ten feet wide, with side paths branching off it, running the full length of the corridor.
• The Anthills — unofficial dirt singletrack on the bayou’s south side, named for its short steep humps, built and maintained by volunteers from the Greater Houston Off-Road Biking Association, including the bridges.
• Ten bridges — the crossings that make the two banks into one connected trail system rather than two dead ends.
• Exercise stations and gazebos — fitness equipment set along the paved route, plus shelters, restrooms and picnic sites at intervals.
• A working wildlife corridor — herons, egrets, barred owls, red-shouldered hawks, turtles, armadillos and coyotes all use this strip, which is one of the few continuous forested links left in west Harris County.

What’s inside

The landscape architecture came from SWA Group, commissioned by the Harris County Flood Control District, and the design brief was unusual: build a park inside an active floodway without compromising it. The team used gabions for slope retention, replaced an old service road with a meandering trail through pine and oak stands, added meadow openings for passive use, and encouraged shrub and tree growth along the edges. Approvals had to come from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Houston Lighting and Power, the City of Houston and three separate pipeline companies.

• A paved hike-and-bike trail suitable for road bikes, strollers and wheelchairs, lit along some sections.
• Dirt trails through the bottomland forest, for mountain bikes and for walkers who want to be off asphalt.
• A pedestrian underpass linking the park into the wider trail system without a road crossing.
• Multiple trailheads with their own parking, so you can start anywhere along the corridor.
• A playground, picnic sites, gazebos and restrooms distributed along the length.
• Open meadow areas within the floodway that double as detention capacity when the bayou rises.

What to do and who it’s for

• Distance runners — a continuous paved surface long enough to run a marathon build-up without repeating a loop, with mile markers and water points.
• Road cyclists and commuters — smooth asphalt, no traffic lights, and connections into the wider west Houston trail network.
• Mountain bikers — the Anthills are the closest genuine off-road riding to central Houston, technical enough to be interesting and short enough to lap.
• Dog walkers — miles of leashed walking with shade, which is scarce in this part of the city.
• Birders and naturalists — the bottomland forest and bayou edge hold species that never show up in the surrounding subdivisions.
• Geocachers — the corridor has long been one of the denser caching areas in the Houston region.

Getting there and practicalities

The park threads the Energy Corridor and the Memorial-area neighborhoods of far west Houston, running along the bayou between the Barker Reservoir dam at its western end and the outer beltway at its eastern end. There is no rail: METRORail’s Red, Green and Purple lines all serve the inner city and none of them comes near here, so access is by car, by bicycle from the surrounding neighborhoods, or by METRO Park and Ride bus to the Energy Corridor followed by a walk. Entry is free, and each trailhead has its own free lot — starting from a mid-corridor lot rather than an end one saves a lot of doubling back. Hours are posted at the trailheads; sections of the paved trail are lit, but the dirt trails are strictly a daylight proposition. Allow an hour for a short paved out-and-back, half a day to ride the length and the singletrack. Two realities to plan around. First, heat: from June to September highs sit in the mid-90s Fahrenheit with dew points near 75, and while the forest sections are shaded, long stretches of the paved trail are not — go before nine in the morning or after seven at night. Second, water: this is a floodway and a bottomland, so mosquitoes are relentless at dawn and dusk from April through November, fire ants colonize the trail verges, and venomous snakes including cottonmouths live along Houston’s bayou corridors. Do not ride the dirt trails when they are wet — it destroys them, and local riders will tell you so.

When to visit

Spring turns the bottomland electric green and brings the migration through, but it is also the severe-storm season and the bayou can come up fast. Summer belongs to early risers: by ten in the morning the paved trail is a heat sink, and only the deep forest sections and the Anthills stay tolerable. Fall is the reason people move here — from mid-October the humidity breaks, the trail fills with runners training for the winter marathon season, and the singletrack finally dries out properly. Winter strips the canopy back, opening long sight lines down the bayou that are invisible the rest of the year, with mild days in the 50s and 60s and the occasional hard freeze.

Worth knowing

Terese “Terry” Tarlton Hershey (1923–2017) got involved in 1966, when she and her neighbors noticed felled trees and bulldozed undergrowth along Buffalo Bayou and discovered that the Harris County Flood Control District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers were rerouting the bayou with no public notice. She joined the Buffalo Bayou Preservation Association and ran the campaign from 1967 to its successful conclusion in 1971, taking the case to a newly elected congressman named George H. W. Bush, who arranged for her to address a House appropriations subcommittee. The federal money for channelization was blocked. The National Environmental Policy Act, signed into law on January 1, 1970, then made public notice and environmental impact statements mandatory for federal projects of this kind, which changed the terms of every fight that followed. Hershey was the second woman appointed to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission, entered the Texas Women’s Hall of Fame in 1989, and received the Pugsley Medal from the American Academy for Park and Recreation Administration in 2003. Bush later called her “a force of nature for nature.” The land she was fighting over had been acquired by the Army Corps in the 1940s as part of the Addicks and Barker reservoir project; the county built the linear park on flood control district right-of-way and established it in 1989 as Buffalo Bayou Park, renaming it for Hershey in 1991. The irony arrived in 2011, when the flood control district’s “Charting Buffalo” study of thirty-two miles of the bayou proposed detention ponds of about three to four acres each in the wooded south side of the park. GHORBA’s president Bill Rustam said flatly that it would mean the complete loss of the trail system with no replacement; the “Save the Anthills” campaign pushed alternative sites, and the singletrack is still there. On the park’s current state, be realistic. It sits immediately downstream of Barker Dam, and during Hurricane Harvey in August 2017 the Corps opened the gates at Addicks and Barker, at times adding up to seven million gallons per minute to an already flooded Buffalo Bayou — the park was underwater and stayed closed for repairs, as it had after earlier floods and has since. Then came the derecho of May 16, 2024, with winds near 100 mph, and Hurricane Beryl on July 8, 2024; parks across Houston lost enormous numbers of mature trees and trails stayed closed for weeks while crews cut. Expect blowdowns, reroutes and closed segments, and check before you commit to a long ride.

Visitor tips

• Never ride or run the dirt trails within a day or two of heavy rain. Wet singletrack takes ruts that volunteers then have to repair by hand.
• Electric bikes are allowed on the paved trail but not on the dirt trails under Texas law — a rule that has been in force since 2020 and is enforced by other users as much as by the county.
• Start from a trailhead in the middle of the corridor rather than at either end if you want the option of turning around without a long slog back to the car.

Questions and answers

How long is the trail? More than eleven miles in total, laid along roughly six miles of Buffalo Bayou, with ten bridges linking the two banks and side paths branching off the paved spine.

Who was Terry Hershey? Terese Tarlton Hershey (1923–2017), the Houston conservationist who stopped the channelization of Buffalo Bayou through a campaign that ran from 1967 to 1971, took her case to Congressman George H. W. Bush, and was later called “a force of nature for nature” by him.

Can I mountain bike here? Yes. The Anthills, on the south side of the bayou, are volunteer-built dirt singletrack maintained by the Greater Houston Off-Road Biking Association, and they are the closest real off-road riding to central Houston.

Is the park accessible by public transport? Not directly. No METRORail line reaches west Houston at this distance; the practical options are driving, cycling in from surrounding neighborhoods, or a METRO Park and Ride bus into the Energy Corridor and a walk from there.

Does it flood? Regularly and by design. The park is an active floodway immediately downstream of Barker Dam, and it went completely under during Hurricane Harvey in 2017 when reservoir releases peaked at up to seven million gallons per minute.

Is it safe from snakes and insects? Treat it as bottomland, because it is. Cottonmouths live along Houston’s bayous, fire ants colonize the trail verges, and mosquitoes are severe at dawn and dusk from April through November. Staying on the trail and using repellent handles almost all of it.

Are dogs allowed? Yes, on a leash, on both the paved and dirt trails. There is no off-leash area within the park.

Is everything open right now? Assume not all of it. Between the 2024 derecho, Hurricane Beryl and repeated bayou flooding, segments have been closed for tree clearing and repairs, and conditions change after every major storm.