State Parks

They’re called mountains, but they’re really enormous piles of rubble – granite boulders honeycombed with caves, cracks and crevices. They began about 34 million years ago as balloons of hot magma rising into the surrounding limestone. Over time, the overlying ...

South Llano River State Park is a haven for birders, with a lazy river that flows even in the dry seasons, fed by hundreds of springs along its course.

In the middle of the West Texas desert lies a deep, blue-green pool of water that never runs dry. Its rocky walls have the contours of a tropical reef. Schools of silvery fish dart in unison through the crystal waters, while turtles dance on its pebbled bottom.

Devil’s Sinkhole is nature's biggest room in Texas, with a front door 50 feet wide, opening into a cavern that reaches 350 feet down into the Hill Country limestone.

Davis Mountains State Park is nestled in a valley between steep volcanic mountains, beneath a night sky that offers some of the state's most unobstructed stargazing.

Miles and miles of dry, sandy scrub surrounding the state park suddenly give way at its center to an expanse of ivory sand whipped into dunes rising more than six stories above the desert floor.

Dip beneath the park’s scrubby hills to see a colony of hundreds of thousands of bats or towering calcite crystals dripping like candle wax down the back of a pitch black cavern.

The centerpiece of Enchanted Rock State Natural Area is an enormous dome of pink granite that looms over the surrounding landscape.

The rest of Texas’ state parks would fit comfortably inside Big Bend Ranch, a sprawling, mountainous desert of 311,000 acres next door to the national park that shares the same name.

Goose Island - a small state park of just 321 acres - has two faces: a mainland forest of live oak, red bay and yaupon holly and an oyster shell island in Aransas Bay. Among its claims to fame is one of the oldest trees in Texas.