Two Bike Riders Find Urban Adventure Along Fort Worth’s Trail System

This trip is an urban bikepacking overnighter that’s lived in my head for years now, and I’ve enlisted good friend and photographer Jerod Foster to join me. Our plan is to bike along Fort Worth’s Trinity Trails system, a 100-mile network of concrete paths that parallels the Trinity River and Marine Creek. We will visit two of Cowtown’s most iconic mountain bike trails along with some of the city’s notable and diverse landmarks. Jerod and I will finish the day at the southern terminus of the Trinity Trails, where we will camp in a hardwood forest along the bottomlands of Benbrook Lake.

Our epic journey begins in the most mundane of urban structures: the catacombs of a parking garage.

My phone pings with a text from Jerod. “I’m not sure what level I’m on, but if you keep taking right turns, you’ll find me.” I drive into the shadowed canyons of downtown and find the parking garage on Throckmorton Street and ascend until I reach the third level. Jerod stands in the gray hues of the brightly lit garage holding his down sleeping bag while loitering next to his SUV. “You just hanging out in a parking garage with a sleeping bag?” I ask with a chuckle. “Ha, ha! Yeah, that’s where I slept last night. Right there!” He points to the spot next to his truck. I unload my bike, and Jerod stuffs his sleeping bag into his seat bag.

We exit the garage and ride north to Sundance Square Plaza, the red-bricked pedestrian promenade in the heart of the city. It’s a chilly Sunday morning in February. The plaza’s fountains are dormant, and the communal space is a ghost town. I circle the plaza, pedaling around the giant mirrored cowboy hat at the north end and in and out of the tables underneath a mural featuring a herd of longhorn cattle. Suddenly, a security guard appears. “Dismount and walk your bike through the plaza,” he informs. Duly noted. I blame that glistening cowboy hat. It enticed me to circle it like a kid in a cul-de-sac.

We spend a few minutes rambling around the exquisite pink granite Tarrant County courthouse that anchors downtown before accessing the West Fork of the Trinity River. I spot an opening at Heritage Park, and we drop down a steep brick path to the river’s floodplain. Our first destination is 10 miles east — Gateway Park. Fort Worth’s largest metropolitan park is nearly 800 acres packed with baseball and soccer fields, a disc golf course and the city’s first off-leash dog park, Fort Woof. On our journey to the green space, we duck under bridges, navigate low-water crossings and ride beneath train trusses as the Trinity Trail navigates the urban jungle.

A few miles from the park, I stop beneath a billboard advertising Cowtown’s newest slogan to the drivers on Interstate 30. The graphic features folks in Western wear line dancing, and the caption reads, “Fort Worth, The Unexpected City.” It’s a campaign that Visit Fort Worth launched in 2023. “I feel like line dancing is something you’d expect in Fort Worth,” I declare to Jerod. “What we’re doing is the unexpected. They should put us on that billboard.”

We cross the Trinity on a lowhead dam. Water flows quickly through the dam’s chutes beneath us and laps across the bike path surface we traverse. Earlier in the week, North Texas experienced over two inches of rainfall. These low-water crossings on the Trinity (we will cross several more) are wet and littered with debris from the previous high-water flow.

I planned this route to showcase two of the Fort Worth Mountain Bike Association’s premier trails, Gateway and Marion Sansom Park. Unfortunately, both will be too wet to ride, but a visit to Gateway Park is still needed. As we ride along the heavily wooded corridors of the park, we encounter a large group (also called a “mob” or “search party”) of disc golfers waiting to launch their discs down the fairway. “Better keep up that pace,” one of them shouts as he taps his watch. “He thinks we’re roadies,” I tell Jerod. “He doesn’t realize that we are to road cyclists what disc golfers are to golfers.”

The mountain bike trail at Gateway is a 20-mile network of expertly engineered singletrack. The section east of the Trinity River is my favorite, with more technical terrain featuring climbs, jumps and berms. We check the trailhead, and it’s too wet to ride, so we stay on the bike path, taking in the soccer games as we exit the park.

We ride along the north side of the river on our way to the Fort Worth Stockyards National Historic District. Inside the dense tree cover along the right side of the trail, we pass the marquee for the old Meadowbrook Drive-In that closed in 1987. It’s a bit of unintended trail art that nature is reclaiming.

We exit the banks of the Trinity River, take a cut-through to pick up Marine Creek, and meet a group of tourists on a horseback trail ride. The situation gets a bit raucous as Jerod pulls his bike off the path so he can capture folks in the saddle. The trail ride leader’s horse is unnerved and starts trotting sideways. “He doesn’t like that bike on the ground,” the young woman says. She’s wearing a cowboy hat and checkered Van shoes in the stirrups. Now that’s unexpected! She takes the reins and works her steed past Jerod’s bike. We tip our helmets to the riders. They disperse onto the Trinity Trail, and we mosey into the Stockyards.

We follow Marine Creek as it curves through a lush green lawn. The tranquil waters ripple over rocks as the creek flows along the backside of the posh Hotel Drover. We push our bikes along the path next to the creek and stop for lunch at Second Rodeo Brewing. It is a beautiful day, and the Stockyards are packed with folks in their best cowboy hats and boots. No one pays us any mind as we eat al fresco with our loaded bikes leaned against the restaurant’s pickup bed booths.

We retreat through Mule Alley, where restaurants, bars, shops and people proliferate. Jerod leans against a brick wall to tighten a loose screw on his shoe that holds a cleat for clipping into his pedal. A team of horses clip-clop by, pulling a stagecoach down Mule Alley. I ask Jerod if he wants me to find him a farrier (horse shoer). Jerod repairs his hoof, I mean shoe, and we’re on our way.

The next several miles, we ride north along Marine Creek through a greenbelt of public spaces: Rodeo Park, Lincoln Park, Marine Creek Linear Park and Buck Sansom Park. Due to the recent rains, the creek flows quick and clear like Rocky Mountain snow runoff. At Buck Sansom, we take an abandoned path through a pocket forest into the neighborhoods of north Fort Worth.

Marion Sansom Park (three miles from Buck Sansom Park) is the crown jewel in the Fort Worth Mountain Bike Association’s cadre of mountain bike singletrack. It is 14 miles of technical climbs and descents along the tree-covered limestone bluffs of Lake Worth. At the bottom of those bluffs, along the lake’s spillway, is a spectacular curved waterfall, one of the most unexpected features in the wilds of Fort Worth. Again, the trails are too wet to ride, but I’ve got an alternative plan. We start at Inspiration Point, a rock shelter built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in 1927, and hike our bikes down the crumbled limestone trail that’s more scree field than foot path. We make it to the waterfall and find other intrepid souls fishing, running and lingering about the spillway. Jerod wants a shot of me and the waterfall, so I ride along the wet and dimpled surface of the spillway to the precipice of the falls. We don’t have time to linger; camp is still 26 miles away. Riding back across the spillway, I puncture my tire on something sharp. I throw in a tube, and we’re back in business.

We ride south through the Eastgate neighborhood, to the River District, and back on the Trinity Trail system as it skirts the West Fork of the Trinity River. Jerod and I wander through more cozy neighborhoods like Crestwood and Monticello until we hit the Cultural District, home to world-class museums like the Modern Art Museum, the Kimbell Art Museum and the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. We stop for a moment along the Amon Carter’s elevated plaza and rest our bikes next to a towering bronze sculpture called Upright Motives. From this perch in the Cultural District, we see downtown straight ahead, and to our right is the Art Deco Pioneer Tower that stands guard over the Will Rogers Memorial Center. That’s where they hold the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo every February. We cut through the stock show barns, past Dickies Arena and pick up the bike path along the Clear Fork of the Trinity River. Like any great Western movie, we ride west into the sunset above the shallow wetlands in the river bottom.

We stop for dinner at a Whole Foods along the bike path and eat everything in the store: salad, pasta, cookies and more salad. We have elevated to bike-glamping. Ten miles later, when we ride into camp at the South Holiday Park along the shores of Benbrook Lake, it is pitch black. We set up our tents under a towering cottonwood tree, and I sleep the unfettered slumber of a man living off his bike.

The next morning, we ride northeast back to downtown and stop at The Trailhead in the Clearfork District to have lunch. This is where folks launch their outdoor fun on the Trinity Trail: bike, run, walk the pooch, or simply stroll and enjoy the weather, and today is another bluebird day. The Press Café and Bike Mart are housed in a slant-roof modern structure with ample outdoor dining. Live oaks shade a green lawn next to the Trinity Trail along the restaurant’s patio. Jerod and I saddle up to a table under a green umbrella next to a planter with pansies. We order two gourmet blue-cheese burgers and watch people come and go along the path. Yep, we are certainly bike-glamping. I wonder if I could live along Trinity Trail like the cowpokes who drove cattle up the Chisholm Trail in the late 1800s? Nah, I would miss my wife and hound dogs.

We arrive back at our downtown parking garage. Total mileage for the trip is 72 miles. “We should take the elevator up,” Jerod suggests. It sounds like a fitting end to a grand urban adventure. We pull our bikes into the elevator and take the ride up. The elevator rings out like a bike bell. “Ding!” Level three. The trip is over.