Summer finds nesting songbirds along this trail and the River Trail, including loggerhead shrikes, who capture grasshoppers and stick them on screwbean mesquite barbs to snack on latter. The trail is sometimes closed in spring and summer due to flooding. It circles around a large old oxbow lake fringed with prolific plant life filled with chattering blackbirds. Most conspicuous in the marshes are cattail, smartweed, and bullrush, fringed by coyote and black willow. The tall plumed plant is the exotic phragmites, locally called carrizo.
Raptors nest along some overhanging slopes.
Except for the optional spur, the trail is flat and easily traversed. It is closed during the Festival of the Cranes. The 1,600 acres of lush wetlands are the Bosque s primary attraction for both birds and people, but flanking these bottomlands are almost 25,000 acres of Chihuahua desert mesas and foothills, and another 25,000 acres of grasslands. This trail leads into the realm of the dry but hardly lifeless Chihuahua Desert, which reaches it northernmost limit in this area. The contrast between the green and wet valley floor and the uplands is striking.