Most evenings, somebody from the Hollow rolls a bike through the gate on Cutter Green Drive, crosses Bitters, and picks up the paved trail that runs along Salado Creek toward Phil Hardberger Park. It is a two-minute ride. Nobody in Inwood needs directions to it. What a lot of residents may not have clocked is that the park at the other end of that ride just had one of its most eventful years since the land bridge opened, while something sitting inside their own gate the whole time keeps getting quietly ignored.
A Bridge Built for Traffic Nobody Sees
The Robert L.B. Tobin Land Bridge, the 150-foot-wide crossing that reunited the two halves of Phil Hardberger Park over Wurzbach Parkway, opened in December 2020. It was built to solve a specific problem: the park had been split by a six-lane parkway, and animals were reduced to using small drainage culverts to get from one side to the other. The bridge gave them, and everyone else, a proper crossing instead.
This year, the Phil Hardberger Park Conservancy announced that the Land Bridge had been honored with an ASLA Honor Award in the General Design category from the American Society of Landscape Architects, a national recognition for a piece of infrastructure that most Inwood residents have walked across without thinking of it as infrastructure at all. It is easy to experience the bridge as a scenic stretch of trail with a good view. It was designed and reviewed as something closer to civil engineering for wildlife.
The park's naturalists have been tracking that use since the bridge opened. In the study's early phase, cameras mounted along the crossing documented more than a dozen species using it, including white-tailed deer, coyote, bobcat, Virginia opossum, cottontail rabbit, striped skunk, and red-shouldered hawk. The point of the count was not novelty. It was to confirm that animals were actually using the whole width of the bridge rather than hugging one edge, which is the difference between a wildlife crossing that works and one that just looks like it does.
The Statue That Showed Up in April
The other new landmark is smaller and easier to miss if you always park on the Blanco Road side. On April 29, 2026, a bronze statue of former San Antonio Mayor Phil Hardberger was unveiled near the Urban Ecology Center, on the NW Military Highway side of the park. The statue was commissioned by Harvey E. Najim and created by San Antonio artist Armando Hinojosa, and it marks the man whose vision turned a former dairy farm into the 330-acre park that now anchors Inwood's western edge.
It is a small addition in square footage but a useful one for how it changes the choice of which gate to use. If you have been defaulting to Blanco Road because that is the side closest to the Salado Outdoor Classroom, the statue is one more reason to loop over to the Military Highway entrance every so often.
Three Gates Into One Park
Phil Hardberger Park has three developed entrances, and each one leads to a genuinely different visit. For residents who have only ever used one, here is what the other two actually offer.
| Entrance | What's there | Best for |
|---|---|---|
| NW Military Highway | Urban Ecology Center, west-side dog park, nature play area, the new Hardberger statue | Wildlife-crossing views, off-leash time, the newest landmark |
| Blanco Road | East-side playground, Salado Outdoor Classroom, east-side dog park, Water Loop, Geology Trail, Greenway connection | Families with young kids, a straight shot onto the Salado Creek trail |
| Voelcker Lane | Historic Voelcker Homestead trailhead | A quieter start, more of a straight trail walk than a park visit |
The park is free to enter and open sunrise to sunset, and parking at all three is free as well, though the Conservancy has noted that lots fill on busy weekends and there is no overflow parking allowed along Wurzbach Parkway itself. If a weekend visit is the plan, picking the entrance that matches what you actually want out of the trip, rather than whichever one the map app suggests first, saves a longer walk than expected once the Land Bridge is involved.
The Trail That Starts Two Blocks Before the Park Does
Here is the part that is easy to lose sight of once you live inside the loop: Inwood's connection to all of this is not a shared amenity in the vague sense that most gated communities claim. Several of the neighborhood's subdivisions, including the Hollow, have a gated pedestrian connection directly onto the Salado Creek Greenway, the paved multi-use trail that threads through Phil Hardberger Park on its way north and south. That is a meaningfully different arrangement from driving to a trailhead. It means the greenway functions less like a destination and more like an extension of the street grid.
The scale of what that gate opens onto is easy to undersell. The segment running through Hardberger Park alone covers roughly 20 miles, and a further 2.4-mile extension linking Hardberger Park to West Avenue, near Walker Ranch Historic Landmark Park, is currently under construction as part of the city's broader Howard W. Peak Greenway Trail System. The system as a whole, funded by voter-approved sales tax initiatives dating back to 2000, has grown well past 40 miles of connected paved trail across the city's waterways. Most of that is 10 feet wide, paved in asphalt and concrete, and shaded for long stretches by pecan and live oak, which matters more in a San Antonio August than any other single trail feature.
The trail closes at sunset and reopens at sunrise, which is worth remembering if a walk stretches longer than planned. It is also worth remembering that a neighborhood gate onto a system like this is not something every gated community in North San Antonio can claim. Most residents nearby are driving to a trailhead. Inwood residents are walking to one.
Nine Holes Nobody Plays
Here is the part of the story that sits on the other side of the ledger. While the park two minutes away collected a national design award and a bronze statue this year, the Hollow at Inwood has quietly maintained its own recreational landmark, one that gets almost no attention even from the people who could walk to it.
The Creek at Inwood Hollow is a nine-hole disc golf course designed by John Houck, tucked into an unused drainage area behind the neighborhood's pool and tennis courts. It is short by design, the longest hole tops out around 330 feet, but reviewers who have played it describe a course that rewards accuracy over distance, with tight fairways cut through heavy wood canopy and Discatcher baskets marking each hole. It is the kind of course where a driver is more likely to hurt you than help you.
It is also, by design, private. Access requires either living in the Hollow or being someone's guest, and the course is listed in disc golf directories with the same caveat every time: for Hollow at Inwood HOA members and their guests only. One longtime player's course review put it plainly, guessing that the neighborhood probably has no more than one serious disc golfer living behind its own gate, which means a course built specifically for residents mostly sits unused by the residents it was built for.
That is the contrast worth sitting with. The park just outside Inwood's boundary spent this year collecting recognition for a piece of infrastructure that the whole city can walk across. The neighborhood's own private course, built with the same intent of giving residents something singular, gets played by almost nobody who lives close enough to use it for free. Both are genuinely uncommon amenities. Only one of them is getting used.
If you already live in Inwood, the practical takeaway is simple: the gate at the end of your street is worth more than the habit you have built around it. Try the Military Highway entrance instead of Blanco Road for a change. Walk the extension toward West Avenue once it opens. And if you have a set of discs sitting in the garage, the course behind your own pool has been waiting for you the whole time.
For anyone weighing a move into Inwood, or curious what the rest of San Antonio's Hill Country corridor looks like up close, Jennifer Santrock has spent years working these neighborhoods block by block. Request your free relocation kit to get a local's read on Inwood and the communities around it before you make a decision.
