Lakes, Rivers Provide Year-Round Fun
Published Mar 28, 2008
Tubing is a popular pastime at many of the area's lakes and rivers.
Some folks head for the lake for a day of fishing or skiing, while others prefer to float down the river on a boat or inner tube. Whatever the aquatic endeavor, Alamo area residents are spoiled for choice.
Lakes and rivers throughout the region offer plenty of activities on land or the water. The Guadalupe and Comal rivers are prime destinations for tubers, while boaters and fishermen flock to Canyon Lake and Lake McQueeny year round.
Medina Lake, which was built in 1911 as an irrigation reservoir, is home to one of the area’s best-known destinations: Joe’s Place Marina & Resort. What began as Joe’s Wharf, a fishing camp opened by Joe Granieri in 1916, is now a multipurpose, family-friendly spot with an RV park, camping grounds, cabin rental, beach, boat ramps, dry storage and more.
“We see 500 people a day on the summer weekends, and there’s plenty of people coming and going year-round,” says Gloria Bass, manager. “You can get here from San Antonio within an hour, and it’s a very popular place.”
Fun on the water can also be had within San Antonio’s city limits. The city’s famous River Walk offers the chance to ride in an open, barge-style boat through downtown. And with a $216.6 million restoration and expansion project underway, soon there’ll be even more to see and do on the water and along the banks.
“The San Antonio River Improvements Project has as its goal a 13-mile, linear park that runs through the heart of the city,” says Steven Schauer, manager of external communications for the San Antonio River Authority. “We’re taking the River Walk downtown as the core, and extending north and south from there.”
The north portion of the project already is underway and will link the River Walk to the San Antonio Museum of Art and the Witte Museum. Along the way it will wind through Brackenridge Park and end near the river’s headwaters. It also will include a lock system, which Schauer describes as a “mini Panama Canal.”
“It will raise river traffic up about nine feet so it can continue upstream, then lower it when they’re heading back down,” he says. “It’s really going to be a tourist feature in and of itself.”
The south side of the project will involve undoing work performed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which straightened the river out in the 1950s and 1960s as a flood-control measure. An eight-mile stretch of river will be restored to its original meandering state, complete with a restored ecosystem. And as an added benefit, some historic sites that once were along the river’s edge will soon be there again.
“San Antonio is famous for the Alamo, but we have four other historic missions south of downtown,” Schauer says. “When the Corps came in and straightened out the river, they took it away from them. We’re hoping to reconnect the river to some of the missions, which will bring back some of our culture to its history.”
For more information on the project, visit http://www.sanantonioriver.org.
Story by Joe Morris
Photo by Brian McCord
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