The Best Things to Do in Fort Davis, Texas

Two hours split between a guided constellation tour and a rotation through telescopes from 8 to 22 inches of aperture, run by a working research observatory rather than a visitor attraction. Adult tickets are 25 dollars, students 20, and reservations are required for everything on site.

Start times shift through the year because the observatory sits at the western edge of the Central time zone. In midsummer it is not properly dark until close to 10 p.m. If the sky clouds over, the program moves indoors rather than cancelling.

The fort ran in two stretches, 1854 to 1861 and 1867 to 1891, guarding the San Antonio to El Paso road. What survives is not a reconstruction. Restored officers' quarters and barracks stand on the original parade ground with stone foundations of the vanished buildings laid out around them, backed against the rhyolite cliffs of Sleeping Lion Mountain and North Ridge at the mouth of Hospital Canyon.

The post-war garrison included Black regiments, and the site tells the story of Second Lieutenant Henry O. Flipper, born into slavery in Georgia in 1856 and the first African American graduate of West Point, who was stationed here. The access road is named for him.

The park sits between 5,000 and 6,000 feet, which is why it has oak and juniper where the land below it has creosote. Skyline Drive, built by the Civilian Conservation Corps, runs about five miles along the ridges with pull-offs the whole way, and the Skyline Drive Trail adds roughly 4.5 miles of walking off it.

The enclosed bird blind with its feeders and water is the quiet highlight and worth an hour on its own. A 1.75 mile CCC-built trail connects the park directly to Fort Davis National Historic Site, so you can walk between the two.

Civilian Conservation Corps crews molded the adobe blocks for the walls and a separate CCC company in Bastrop built the furniture. It is the most intact New Deal park lodge in Texas and it is still a working 39 room hotel, booked through the state park reservation system rather than a hotel site.

You do not have to stay to use it. The Black Bear Restaurant serves breakfast and lunch five days a week and is one of the few sit-down meals in the area, with a weekly menu posted rather than a fixed one. The pool is for lodge guests only.

South on Highway 17, west and north on 166, then back south on 118 through the observatory. Seventy four miles of volcanic ridges, rangeland and 8,000 foot peaks, including Mount Livermore, which tops out at Baldy Peak at 8,378 feet and is the highest point in the range.

It is a two hour drive done briskly and a half day done properly. Cyclists ride it too, and the Lawrence E. Wood picnic area on the 118 leg is the obvious stop.

Run by the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute, not a city parks department, which shows in the labeling. The fenced 18 acre botanical garden, the cactus and succulent greenhouse, the pollinator garden and the native grasses exhibit together make the best introduction to what you are looking at everywhere else out here.

There is also a mining exhibit, a bird blind and hiking trails from the Powell Visitor Center at about 5,100 feet, including the walk down into Modesta Canyon. The canyon trail is steeper than it looks on the map.

The Davis Mountains Preserve protects some of the highest country in the range and it opens to the public only a handful of days a year, with reservations. Madera Canyon Trail, next to it, is the exception, kept open from sunrise to sunset every day of the year at no charge.

It climbs through madrone, oak and pine in a canyon that feels nothing like the desert forty minutes downhill. Stay on the trail. Everything off it is private land and the Conservancy is blunt about that.

San Solomon Springs pushes out more than 15 million gallons a day into a CCC-built pool covering 1.3 acres, 25 feet deep at the deepest point, holding 3.5 million gallons and sitting between 72 and 76 degrees all year. People scuba dive in it. There are fish in it.

It is outside Fort Davis proper, in Toyahvale up Highway 17, and it is the standard half-day trip from town. Day passes sell out, there is no lifeguard, and a park improvement project has been running through 2026 with some campsites closed.

A small local museum in the 1883 home and office of Nick Mersfelder, a justice of the peace, barber and photographer whose name turns up all over the county records. The collection is frontier-era material donated by the descendants of the people who used it, including the original Valentine post office.

It is free, it is run by the Fort Davis Historical Society and it is open six hours a week. That is the whole proposition. If you are in town on a Friday or Saturday afternoon, go.