Right now, Dallas has right around 100 miles of hike and bike trails and counting. That's impressive. Less so is their arrangement. They are, with a few notable exceptions, disconnected, less a cohesive network than a collection of self-contained pathways from nowhere to nowhere.
The city of Dallas and the Trinity Trust want to change that, and they want to do it in a big way. On Monday, the City Council's transportation committee will be briefed on the Trinity Forest Spine Trail, a massive, $20-million effort stretching 17.5 miles from White Rock Lake to Interstate 20 and hooking up with several existing and planned trails along the way.
We have a call into the city for more details on a timeline and where exactly the money's coming from. In the meantime, check out the video fly-through HALFF Associates posted on YouTube.
As the clip shows, the Trinity Forest Spine Trail is birthed just south of White Rock, splitting off from the Santa Fe Trail at the Tenison golf course to follow White Rock Creek. It crosses under I-30 near Dolphin Heights, hits the DART Green Line at Lawnview Station, then enters the Great Trinity Forest proper. There, trail users will find a pond
where they can rest in a shaded pavilion:
Moving on, they will cross C.F. Hawn Freeway and encounter another marshy pond, this one with egrets:
The trail then skirts the under-construction Texas Horse Park, hooks past the new Trinity Forest Golf Course (this segment, the AT&T Trail, has already been funded), then parallels an equestrian trail the rest of the way to I-20, which explains the horses:
All the while, trail users can contemplate the poetry of Langston Hughes, Pablo Neruda, and Maya Angelou while soothing themselves with the gentle pulse of new age music. Watch the video. You'll understand.
