6 State Parks Worth the Whole Tank of Gas

You drive across flat brown Panhandle farmland for an hour out of Amarillo, and then the ground opens up. Palo Duro is 800 feet deep and about 30,000 acres, and the road drops into it in a series of switchbacks that make first-time visitors pull over. Most of Texas has never been.

The Lighthouse Trail is the walk everyone does, 5.75 miles round trip to a hoodoo that stands alone on a ridge. Start it before seven in summer. The canyon floor runs about ten degrees hotter than the rim and there is no shade for the last two miles.

Big Bend Ranch is the largest park in the Texas system and the least visited by a wide margin. Its neighbor to the east gets around 500,000 people a year. This one gets a few thousand. You can drive the interior road for three hours and pass nobody.

At the center is the Solitario, a collapsed volcanic dome nine miles across that looks from the air like something dropped on the desert. Getting near it requires high clearance, a permit, and all of your own water. There is no cell service anywhere in the interior and no fuel between Presidio and Study Butte.

Caprock is the park where a bison may block your walk to the restroom, and this is not a figure of speech. The official Texas State Bison Herd descends from animals Charles Goodnight kept in the 1870s, and Texas Parks and Wildlife turned them loose across the whole park in 2011. They go where they want. You wait.

The other draw is the Caprock Canyons Trailway, 64 miles of converted rail bed running from Estelline to South Plains, including a quarter-mile tunnel that a few hundred thousand Brazilian free-tailed bats leave every summer evening.

Enchanted Rock is a granite batholith about a billion years old, rising 425 feet above the surrounding scrub, and the walk to the top takes most people forty-five minutes. It is the easiest big payoff in the state, which is precisely the problem. Day passes release thirty days ahead at eight in the morning and are typically gone by five past.

Go on a weekday in November. The granite is cool, the crowd is thin, and the Llano Uplift looks like a different state from the top.

This park sits at 5,000 feet in the Davis Mountains, which means August nights actually cool off, which means it is the only park in Texas where summer camping is pleasant rather than survivable. The Civilian Conservation Corps laid out the sites in the 1930s and picked them well. They also built Indian Lodge, a white adobe hotel inside the park that still takes bookings and still has the original furniture in some rooms.

Indian Lodge is the reason to plan ahead. The adobe hotel the CCC built in the 1930s still rents rooms inside the park, and they book six months out. Miss the window and you can still camp, drive Skyline Drive at dusk, and make the twice-weekly star party at McDonald Observatory sixteen miles up the road.

Six miles of washboard gravel keeps Colorado Bend quieter than a park ninety minutes from Austin has any business being. At the end of the main trail, a mile and a half out over loose rock, Gorman Falls drops seventy feet down a living travertine face that is still forming. It is the best waterfall in Central Texas and it is not close.

The park also runs guided wild cave tours most weekends, the kind where you crawl. Book ahead, wear clothes you are prepared to throw away, and do not bring a good headlamp you are attached to.