A big part of the planning for our anniversary trip was securing our reservation for this park. Old Tunnel is Texas’ smallest state park and holds two features within it’s 16 acres. The historic railroad tunnel and the bats that now inhabit it. The park is open during the day for exploration, but after 5pm it’s only open to ticket holders for bat emergence viewing. There’s an upper deck viewing area and a lower viewing area. The lower being the most sought after and limited. So, of course, I booked that one 5 months ahead of time! And it was so worth it.

The park posts on facebook each week when people should arrive to make sure they get the best viewing based on the weather, sunset and recent bat behavior. That week, the post advised to be seated by 6:30. Well, Mrs. If-you-aren’t-early-you-are-late got us there by 5:30. Turns out the park volunteer seminar that is a part of the lower level deck BEGINS at 6:30 and the bats come out sometime after 7pm. So we had some time to kill. We started off descending to the old railroad bed to get awesome glimpses of the bats flurrying in the darkness of the tunnel.

Then we went ahead and parked it in our seats a little before six since more folks were starting to fill in. We killed time playing rock paper scissors until, Dennis, our park volunteer began his presentation. And he was a wealth of knowledge! He covered the history of the railroad and how the tunnel came to be, how the bats started appearing and the conservation efforts in place as well as the biology on the two different species that dwell there.

It was starting to get a few minutes past official sunset and about 20 minutes past when the bats had previously emerged that week and Dennis was starting to explain that we are at their mercy and sometimes they just change their minds when…suddenly, a few appeared! Then a couple hundred, then THOUSANDS formed a “batnadoe” 15 feet from us! They funneled up above the tree line then zoomed off to the horizon like a black river in the sky. The event lasted about 20 minutes and we witnessed approximately 3 million bats that night. I got a couple of slow motion videos and Weston got a pretty good photo, but for the most part, we just sat and stared.

What a drastically different experience we had at Old Tunnel versus Devil’s Sinkhole a few months earlier. A real testament to these wild and unique creatures and their habits. We will carry the memory of that complete sensory experience forever. On our way back to our cabin, we stopped at Bankersmith, a Lukenbach-esque watering hole and had a blast with post bat beverages and the fun scenery.

-Lindsay