Bulkheads and shoreline work in Hickory Creek, Texas.

The Town's own parks master plan puts Hickory Creek “nestled along the north side of the Hickory Creek arm of Lewisville Lake.” That arm is a drowned creek valley running roughly east and west, and it gives the town its first shoreline: from Sycamore Bend at the head, west of I-35E, downstream past Harbor Lane and Harbor Grove, the Steeplechase streets, Point Vista, Red Bluff and Shorehaven, to the Corps campground at Hickory Creek Park and the Arrowhead Leg 1 and Leg 2 ramps near the interstate crossing. Dozens of short fingers, points and pocket coves, timber standing right down to the waterline, and very little open water in front of any single lot.

Then there is the second shoreline, and it behaves nothing like the first. The southeastern lobe of town sits on the open main body of the reservoir, south of Lake Dallas and east of the arm's mouth — Tanglewood and Robins Nest, Royal Oaks, Hickory Hills, Main Street, running down to Westlake Park and Oakland Park. That bank looks at miles of open water toward Little Elm and The Colony, and Westlake Park is the closest public launch to the lake's busiest recreational anchorage, so it carries sustained boat wake as well.

This is the Eastern Cross Timbers side of the lake — sandy and sandy-loam soils over the Woodbine, post oak and blackjack, well-drained uplands ending in low banks and short bluffs. The street names admit it: Red Bluff Drive, Lakebluff, Point Vista, Hilltop. A wall that suits a sheltered cove at Shorehaven is not the wall that belongs on the Westlake Park face, and pretending otherwise is how the last generation of Lewisville bulkheads ended up in the lake.

There is no published, town-specific bank-retreat study for Hickory Creek, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling. What is on the record is smaller and more honest: the Town's 2020 Parks, Recreation and Open Space Master Plan lists “shore line improvement at Sycamore Bend” among the things residents themselves asked for. That is the closest thing to a documented complaint about this bank, and it came from the people standing on it.

The rest is the lake's own operating history, which is not in dispute. Lewisville set its record at 536.95 feet msl at one in the morning on 31 May 2015 — roughly fifteen feet over conservation pool and effectively at the top of the flowage easement, drowning the wooded bank and the parks. May and June of 2019 came up again. Texas Parks & Wildlife puts normal annual fluctuation at four to eight feet.

A sandy Cross Timbers bank cycled wet and dry through that range is a mechanism you can design against without pretending to have measured it. Where Shoretech will not guess is the specific numbers — no fetch or wave-climate study has been published for this reservoir, and reach-by-reach soils are a boring question, not a brochure question. What gets designed is what gets surveyed.