Turn off West Slaughter Lane into Mary Moore Searight Metropolitan Park and the first building you pass sits behind a chain-link fence and a locked gate. There's no sign explaining what's back there, just a padlock and a combination that only members know. Behind it: an asphalt runway roughly 550 feet long, built from macadam salvaged out of torn-up Austin streets. Most people who drive past on their way to the parking lot have no idea what it is.

That runway belongs to the Hill Country Aeromodelers, a radio-control airplane club that has operated on this land since the mid-1990s. It's one of three distinct worlds sharing the same 344 acres off Slaughter Lane, and depending on which entrance you use, which trail you take, and which weekend you show up, you might spend years in this park without ever crossing paths with the other two.

The Runway Behind the Locked Gate

The Hill Country Aeromodelers didn't start here. The club began flying model airplanes off a leased field on South Menchaca Road back in 1987. In April 1993, members got word the land was being sold and had ninety days to clear out. Club treasurer James Bruns went looking for a replacement and found a stretch of Mary Moore Searight Park that was, at the time, three-quarters covered in cedar and brush. The city agreed to let the club build there, and members cleared the land and laid the runway themselves, using reclaimed street material to keep costs down.

The field is named for Ralph DeClairmont, a founding member who flew fighter aircraft in the Air Force, logged more than 5,000 flying hours, flew 100 unarmed reconnaissance missions over Hanoi during Vietnam, and earned the Distinguished Flying Cross before retiring into a second career teaching club members how to fly model aircraft on weekends.

"Keep it safe, keep it fun."

That was DeClairmont's standing line at the field, according to the club's own history, and it's still the closest thing the Aeromodelers have to a motto.

The club is chartered under the Academy of Model Aeronautics as club number 1364, runs with somewhere between 95 and 120 members in a given year, and lets pilots under eighteen join without paying dues. The gate stays locked, but spectators are welcome to watch whenever members are out flying, and the field itself is open 365 days a year during park hours, aside from occasional Wednesday mornings set aside for mowing and repairs. Members meet the second Monday of every month at La Posada, a restaurant on West Gate Boulevard in 78745, which means the club's institutional life happens almost entirely outside the park itself. You could live a mile away and never know any of this exists unless you already fly.

The Loop Where the Leashes Come Off

Enter from the other side, near South 1st Street, and you find a different park entirely. This is where the off-leash dog trail sits, a roughly one-mile loop that isn't fenced, which means it runs on trust and recall rather than barriers. Local dog-park guides that track spots across the city single out Searight for being quieter and less crowded than the off-leash areas closer to downtown, the kind of place where a dog that gets overwhelmed by big groups can actually relax.

The rest of the park's trail network, close to six miles when you count the hike, bike, and equestrian paths, stays on-leash. So the off-leash culture here is contained to one specific loop on one specific side of the park, distinct from the crushed-granite fitness trail that loops through the developed core. Someone who only ever parks near the main entrance and walks the paved loop might never realize an unfenced dog area exists on the property at all.

Eighteen Holes a Volunteer Corps Keeps Alive

Thread through the wooded middle of the park and you hit the third world: an 18-hole disc golf course designed by John Houck, rated moderate difficulty, that takes most players about two hours and just under two miles to finish. It's free to play, no reservation, no fee, which is part of why it draws a steady stream of regulars in addition to the tournament crowd.

The course doesn't maintain itself. A volunteer group called Friends of Mary Moore Searight handles the ongoing upkeep, the kind of unglamorous work that keeps fairways mowed and tee pads intact. That volunteer effort is also why the course can host something like Blue Skies Over Texas, an annual tournament that ran its 20th edition on September 7 of this year, or the Austin Am Series Qualifier, a PDGA C-tier event held in late August. Neither of those draws much attention outside the disc golf community, but they're proof the course has enough of a following to support a competitive calendar, not just casual rounds.

For context on how dense this stretch of south Austin is for the sport, Griffis Southpark DGC sits barely a mile and a half away. Two full 18-hole courses within a short drive of each other is not something every part of the city can claim, and it's part of why Searight's course has the kind of dedicated, repeat player base that justifies a volunteer maintenance crew in the first place.

Why the Three Rarely Overlap

Here's the thing that becomes obvious once you've walked all three sections back to back: the park's layout keeps its communities apart almost by design. The entrance road runs you past the locked Aeromodelers gate before you ever reach the main parking area. The disc golf course loops through the wooded center, away from both the dog trail and the runway. The off-leash loop sits clear on the opposite side, closer to South 1st than to Slaughter Lane. Even the addresses disagree. Some records list the park's entrance at 907 West Slaughter Lane under the 78745 ZIP, others place it in 78748, a small bureaucratic split that mirrors the way the park itself splits into separate, barely overlapping territories.

None of the three groups is hiding from the others on purpose. A disc golfer walking the back nine has no particular reason to notice a gated RC runway on the far side of the property, just as an Aeromodelers member arriving for a Saturday morning of flying has no reason to walk the length of the disc golf course first. The park is big enough, and its uses specific enough, that most of the people who use it regularly are only using a third of it.

That's worth knowing if you've lived in 78745 for years and have only ever thought of Searight as "the park with the disc golf course" or "the place to walk the dog off leash." It's also worth knowing if you're new to the neighborhood and trying to figure out where the actual weekend routines happen. This isn't one park. It's three, stitched together by a shared parking lot and a shared name, each with its own regulars, its own unwritten rules, and in the Aeromodelers' case, its own lock and key.

If you're getting to know this corner of south Austin and want a longer conversation about what makes specific pockets of 78745 work the way they do, from the parks to the streets around them, Cody Hobza is always glad to talk it through. Let's Connect.