Palo Pinto Mountains State Park opening date is a moving target. Here’s a preview
If you’ve been eagerly awaiting the opening of Palo Pinto Mountains State Park, there’s good news and there’s bad news.
First, the good news. The 4,871-acre park, 75 miles west of Fort Worth in Strawn, is every bit as scenic as advertised, with canyons, hills, plateaus and ridges.
In the center of it is a 90-acre lake with a wooded shoreline that’s perfect for kayaking, canoeing and fishing, and the park’s 60 campsites were designed with modern trailers and RVs in mind, offering a little more space and privacy than sites in parks laid out decades ago.
Palo Pinto Mountains will also have greater accessibility. Trails and facilities were designed with people with disabilities in mind, and there will even be off-road wheelchairs available.
In short, the park is as nice as you hope it will be. The bad news is you’ll still have to wait to see for yourself, until at least 2026, according to Park Superintendent James Adams.
Palo Pinto Mountains State Park was initially scheduled to open in 2023. Construction delays and material back-orders pushed that to 2025, but as of May 21, there was a lot of work left to do.
The park’s headquarters is more or less finished, but it’s mostly empty inside, with no trace of the interpretive exhibits it will house. Other structures, like restrooms and the park’s pavilion, are ready for visitors, and the campsites are laid out and connected to utilities, but roads still need to be paved and retaining walls alongside those roads still need to be completed. The day the Star-Telegram was there, a crew was busy working on the hiking and cycling trail system.
Talking with James Adams, who has been at Palo Pinto Mountains since 2017, one gets the sense he’s as ready as anyone for guests to finally arrive.
“By far, the most common question that’s asked of me is, ‘When are y’all going to open?’” said Adams. “I’d love to be able to give you a date, and you can trust me that when I have a date, nobody’s going to have to ask.”
Policy change will expedite future park openings
While it may not speed things up at Palo Pinto Mountains, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department did institute a policy change on May 22 that would get people into future state parks sooner.
As first reported by the Dallas Morning News, the expectation moving forward is that new parks will open within 12 months of land acquisition for “facilitated public day use,” which includes things like guided tours and special events.
Within 18 months of land acquisition, parks must be “open for expanded public day use with access to basic essential components (e.g., limited trails, parking areas, restrooms).
Finally, new parks must be completely open to the public, with all infrastructure and facilities in place, within 48 months of land acquisition.
The Texas Parks and Wildlife Department also committed to providing public updates on each of those three development phases for new parks on its website. Additionally, the agency will provide annual progress reports on new park development to the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission for increased accountability.
Rodney Franklin, the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department’s director of state parks, said the new policy wasn’t implemented in response to the Palo Pinto Mountains delays.
“There’s always been an interest in opening parks as soon as we could,” he said. “We just haven’t been able to deliver on that. We’re in a different time now with some of the funding the legislature and the public has voted on, and it’s given us the opportunity to have a little more flexibility.”
Franklin said the Centennial Parks Conservation Fund, a 2023 voter-approved measure that earmarked $1 billion for new state park development, provided the financial shot in the arm to expedite park openings.
Franklin sounded confident when he said Palo Pinto Mountains State Park would open in early 2026, though he qualified that by saying several factors, chief among them being the weather, could always push that back.
Next on the horizon, Franklin said, is Post Oak Ridge State Park, a newly acquired property on the Colorado River southeast of San Saba and just down the road from Colorado Bend State Park.
Franklin said hunters will have access to the property this fall in keeping with the new opening policy. In the next 12 months, there will be guided tours and some trail access at Post Oak Ridge, according to Franklin.
This story was originally published June 5, 2025 at 5:50 AM.