KERRVILLE – As she surveyed the bank of the Guadalupe River, Carole Griffin spotted something unexpected: a small buttonbush plant, growing unnoticed not far from the water’s edge.
For months, she and fellow volunteers from the local Texas Master Naturalist chapter had been tending to this section on the Kerrville River Trail, planting new trees, shrubs and grasses. It was part of the Kerr County River Foundation’s efforts to shore up the riverbanks and help the river recover after the July 4, 2025 flood.
When the Guadalupe rose again this July, they feared that work might have been undone.
That wasn’t the case: While the second flood caused major damage, more than half of the new plantings survived.
Weeks later, Griffin and her fellow volunteers were finding more plants they figured had been washed away, growing back after all.
They used branches and sticks left behind from the flood to form a fence around the buttonbush, to protect it from ravenous deer. They’d done the same around other trees nearby that also survived the second flood.
In the face of the flood’s devastation, the scrawny trees can seem insignificant.
But for those who spent the past year trying to help the Guadalupe recover from the flood damage, it’s a story of hope – and evidence that there is a path that leads to a better future for the river.
Securing the long-term health of the river – which is crucial not only for the area’s ecosystem, but also for Kerr County’s economy and quality of life – won’t be as simple as picking up trash, hauling away debris or dredging out the gravel the floods piled into the riverbed.
What’s needed, experts and advocates say, is a new vision for the people who manage and use the waterway, one that understands how the Guadalupe functions and reimagines what is needed to protect and preserve it.
“We have to change our perspective and begin to think about how can the river use this experience, this next flood that it experiences, to actually heal itself,” said Ryan McGillicuddy, a biologist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department. “Because that’s what rivers do.”
Starting the recovery
The 2025 flood that killed 119 people in Kerr County carved a path of destruction from the South Fork of the Guadalupe west of Hunt to Center Point on the county’s eastern side.
The river swept up everything in its path, tearing out century-old cypress trees. In some areas, huge amounts of gravel, boulders and sediment were dropped and left behind in the riparian area – the term for the land right alongside a stream or lake.
Crews cleaning up after the 2025 flood removed much of the woody debris that was left – downed trees, branches, roots and anything else that could be cleared. Some residents described the barren river banks that were left behind as “a moonscape.”
The flood and its aftermath wiped away more than half of the vegetation in the river’s floodway, according to an analysis done last fall by Clint Carter, an ecologist and member of a river-focused working group under Kerr Together, the county’s new recovery organization.
Riparian areas, and the vegetation there, play a key role in the health of a watershed. They help protect water quality by catching and filtering sediment, and vegetation helps riverbanks hold up against erosion. During a flood, a functional riparian area acts as a sponge, soaking in water and helping slow flowing water.
In the months that followed the first flood, residents and local organizations and agencies started discussing how to replace that lost vegetation and accelerate recovery, and began coordinating efforts:
- The Hill Country Alliance and Texas Parks and Wildlife staff organized workshops and planting projects.
- The Kerr County River Foundation led volunteer groups to adopt and care for sections of the River Trail.
- The Upper Guadalupe River Authority scaled up efforts to control invasive plant species that spread after the flood.
- The San Antonio Botanical Garden began collecting thousands of seeds from the area, with a goal of growing and planting 50,000 trees over five years to replace those lost.
Tens of thousands of native plants and seeds – all carefully selected to try to jumpstart the recovery process – were distributed to landowners and planted along the banks. At just one event in June, the groups handed out more than 7,000 plants.
More than 2,000 live stakes were planted along the river. Those are branches cut from trees and put directly into the ground, where they then grow roots.
As summer returned, conversations shifted to long-term projects. River recovery group members talked about ways to document progress to prove it was working and discussed plans for educational efforts. They considered the botanical garden’s plans for a fall planting schedule, and discussed ways to protect those new trees.
As the first anniversary of the flood approached, progress was visible along the river, with lush vegetation sprouting.
In the sky over Louise Hays Park on July 4, illuminated drones took the shape of a seedling growing into a tree during a drone show commemorating the flood and recovery.
‘A one-two punch’
Twelve days later, storms parked over the Hill Country and flooded Kerr County again. Some areas that were spared in the first flood took the brunt of the second.
In 2025, the heaviest rain fell over the South Fork in the western part of the county, sending a wall of water down the main channel of the river. In 2026, it poured over the creeks that feed the river, sending them out of their banks. Runoff in both rural and urban areas flooded homes and businesses, with the most damage concentrated in Kerrville.
“It was a local flood, not an incoming flood,” County Judge Rob Kelly said the following week at a news conference with Gov. Greg Abbott.
Much of that was due to the differences in where rain fell — but Kelly noted something else that exacerbated the damage, bringing up a topic that was far from the forefront a year earlier.
“A lot of that I attribute to the fact that the flood last year came roaring down that river valley and tore out all the riparian growth,” he said, describing the cypress trees uprooted in the first flood. That stripped out the vegetation that could have helped slow water down, he said, “so by the time it hit Kerrville, it hit hard and fast.”
“The higher concentration of flows in streams and tributaries in Kerrville really blew out a lot of gravel banks and redeposited it,” said Matt Welch, the San Antonio Botanical Garden’s director of conservation and collections.
“The second flood took everyone by surprise,” he said. “It was a one-two punch that came through and annihilated certain areas.”
Surprising survival
When the second flood hit, River Foundation co-founder Jeremy Walther figured much of the recovery work from the past year had been ripped away.
But when volunteers got out to the river, they found that wasn’t the case.
Some of the new trees were bent over and stripped of their leaves. But more than half of the organization’s trees were still standing, or were able to be propped back up to keep growing.
“What we’ve shown is, if planted well, those young trees are resilient,” Walther said.
Others who led restoration efforts saw similar results.
“Every site is different,” said Daniel Oppenheimer, the Hill Country Alliance’s land program director. In some areas, there were setbacks; but in others, especially upstream of Kerrville, “the plantings rocked it, they’re doing really well.”
The Upper Guadalupe River Authority said there was some damage at its riverside park property near Nimitz Lake, but most of the new cypress survived and the vegetation helped hold the soil, preventing a repeat of last summer’s erosion.
McGillicuddy, the Texas Parks and Wildlife biologist, said similar things happened elsewhere along the river, particularly on the upper reaches.
“From afar, it might look pretty terrible in some spots, but we actually are seeing improved function in some places,” he said. “A lot of effort has been put into this and a lot of steps have been taken to where the river is in a little bit better position to be able to withstand some of these events.”
‘Leave the rest’
As they clean up from the second flood, Kerr County residents and officials are trying to put the river in a better position to recover than it was a year ago.
Unlike last year, local governments are handling debris removal this time, not state contractors. That means they can encourage people to leave behind materials that can be useful, instead of repeating the mass-clearing that happened last summer.
Downed trees can help shore up banks, providing stability in places where the river stripped away vegetation. The woody debris can also catch sediment, helping build back up the banks over time. It can also shelter new growth and help protect it from the ever-hungry deer.
“To be frank, it’s cheaper to do riparian restoration than it is to get a bunch of these trucks down in the river doing all that (clearing),” Kerrville Assistant City Manager Michael Hornes told the river working group. “So it’s better and it’s cheaper, so that works out in everybody’s favor.”
The flooding forced the Upper Guadalupe River Authority to call off its annual summer river cleanup for a second year. But the agency has shifted to a series of cleanup events targeting the hard-hit creeks, where they’re encouraging volunteers to pick up litter, but leave everything else as it is.
Rebeca Gibson, the Hill Country Alliance’s regional engagement manager, said there’s a wider understanding now of why that’s a better way.
“People understood that was an asset, and this year they are taking control of that and doing things differently,” she said. “That human shift in knowledge and awareness is probably the most valuable outcome you can ask for.”
That was the case for Lisa Nye-Salladin, whose business, Hill Country Bicycle Works, backs up to Town Creek. When she saw the mess left behind, her first thought was “everything has to go,” she said.
But a walk with Oppenheimer, who showed her how that woody debris can be helpful, shifted her perspective. Now she’s preaching to others to “pull the trash out and leave the rest, and let nature take its course.”
She was doing just that on a recent weekday, along with a handful of other volunteers working in Louise Hays Park.
The group set to work clearing out anything manmade: pieces of fencing strewn along the water’s edge, metal embedded in the ground, plastic wrapped around trees. But they left the messy twigs and roots, the downed branches and the uprooted trunks.
“It might look a little chaotic,” Nye-Salladin said, “but it’s going to help the next generation of plants grow.”
The next generation
Plans are already in the works to start planting more for that next generation.
Walther said the river foundation is looking to expand its adopt-a-river-trail program, and wants those sites to be examples of what restoration work can look like.
Like last year, the local organizations are meeting with landowners to talk about repairing damage, including those whose property is along creeks. They’re continuing to hand out seeds and plants, with the first large-scale distribution scheduled for November.
The San Antonio Botanical Garden is moving ahead with plans to plant more than 25,000 trees along the river. The garden and a dozen partner nurseries grew tens of thousands of seedlings over the past year, and are now doing “stress conditioning” to prepare them for the elements once they’re planted, Welch said.
From November to March, they’ll be planting two or three times a week on about three dozen private properties and a handful of public ones, he said. Many of those are in the river’s upper reaches, where the first flood hit harder, but others are in Kerrville and downstream in Comfort and Center Point, which had more damage this year.
Welch said the organization is still thinking about how to adapt to the river’s changes from the second flood, particularly the way the flood moved rocks around and shifted gravel bars on the banks.
After a second flood, it’s even clearer that “resilience is key,” he said.
That means being prepared to grow and plant more trees, with the knowledge that they might lose some.
“We’re just going to plant in those areas that we think are going to lend themselves to success,” he said, “and then just monitor and do as much after-care as we can and hang tight.”
‘With the river in mind’
While the second flood interrupted some recovery projects, it hasn’t halted them. For many involved, it invigorated them, offering proof of the need to think about the river’s long-term health.
Kerr County River Foundation is still working through engineering for an improved Lion’s Park in Center Point. The Hill Country Alliance, partnering with the river working group, is hiring a consultant to develop a “post-flood restoration and resilience plan” for the upper Guadalupe watershed.
The goal of the plan, which was funded by the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country, is a 10-year vision for the river’s health, including assessments of flood impacts and other threats to the river, and “a coordinated set of science-based actions to restore the river and provide long-term resilience.”
Gibson said she hopes to bring more of the community into the river recovery work.
“Not every person that is impacted by the river is a riverfront property owner,” she said, “and that connection to the river extends beyond the lands adjacent.”
McGillicuddy, who worked in a similar situation after two floods on the Blanco River in 2015, said the Guadalupe’s recovery mirrors the human experience of healing from back-to-back disasters.
“Our rivers are scarred and there’s a fresh wound on that land,” McGillicuddy said. “Just like the people of this community who are hurt right now and working towards healing, the river is doing the same and it’s going to take some time.”
“Sometimes that means stepping out of the way and letting the river do what it wants, and sometimes it means taking a really active approach,” he said. “But in all cases, it means we manage thoughtfully with the river in mind.”
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