Dam B is a bottomland maze of sloughs, hardwoods, and reservoir water

At the fork of the Angelina River, the Neches River, and B.A. Steinhagen Reservoir, the ground gets low, wet, and complicated in a very East Texas way. The Angelina-Neches/Dam B Wildlife Management Area covers 12,636 acres in Jasper and Tyler counties, and about 7,000 of those acres are reservoir water. You are not looking at one neat park unit here; you are looking at a watery corner where river, reservoir, timber, and floodplain all overlap.

The land side helps explain this corner of the county. Hardwood bottomland and river floodplains run across flat ground broken by sloughs and ridges. Water oak, cypress, sweet gum, and red oak grow in the low country, while mature loblolly and shortleaf pine stand on higher sites. It is wet, rough, and tangled ground.

People use the area for hunting, fishing, primitive camping, hiking, biking, wildlife watching, and photography. The dam itself was built for rice-farming water and now also serves flood-control and freshwater-flow purposes. Bring drinking water, expect mosquitoes and summer humidity, and do not count on restroom facilities. Dam B is beautiful, but it is not polished.