What is the public’s right to fish in streams and rivers in Texas?
It is not legal to walk on other people’s property without their permission. You may have heard that it is okay to walk along creeks as long as you stay within ‘x’ feet of the water. That’s not true. It is not legal to go onto private property without the permission of the landowner. If the creekbed is privately owned, then you need the owner’s permission to wade in the creek, or walk next to the creek. If the creekbed is publicly owned or if the creek is a navigable stream, the public has the right to walk and/or wade in the creekbed itself, as long as you don’t go up onto private property. There is no right to trespass to get to a public streambed. The hard part is usually determining exactly where the public streambed ends and the privately owned adjacent property begins. The streambed consists of all land within the “gradient boundary” of the bed. In many cases, it takes a professional survey to determine the location of the gradient boundary in a given area. The streambed is not n
