The Best Day Trips from Fort Worth

The theropod and sauropod tracks at Dinosaur Valley are in the limestone bed of the Paluxy River itself. Whether you see them depends on how much water is running, and low water is the good news, because you walk out and put your own hand in a footprint. The park regularly reaches capacity and turns cars away at the gate, which makes the reservation less optional than it sounds.

Nine miles away, Fossil Rim Wildlife Center at 2299 County Road 2008 runs a 7.2 mile scenic drive through 1,800 acres of open pasture holding rhino, giraffe and cheetah. Gates open at 8.30 a.m., the last vehicle is admitted at 4.30 p.m., and self guided tickets run $29.95 for anyone 12 and older and $24.95 for ages 3 to 11. Buy them ahead at fossilrim.org.

W. C. Dodson designed the three story limestone courthouse in French Second Empire style and it went up in 1890 and 1891. Roughly 40 independent shops and about a dozen restaurants fill 19th century storefronts on all four sides, with no chain frontage breaking the block. The district joined the National Register of Historic Places on 5 June 1974.

Two things make this a full day rather than an hour. The 1886 Granbury Opera House at 133 E Pearl St programs a year round season through Granbury Theatre Company, and the Brazos Drive-In at 1800 W Pearl St, reachable at (817) 573-1311, has been running since 1952, holds 250 cars, plays double features Friday and Saturday nights and sends the sound to your AM radio.

Penitentiary Hollow is a pocket of 20 to 40 foot sandstone walls inside Lake Mineral Wells State Park, and it is the closest real climbing to Fort Worth. Top roping and rappelling only. You register at park headquarters and sign a release every visit, free soloing and bouldering are prohibited, and the area closes when the rock is wet. The rest of the park holds 12.8 miles of trail around a 640 acre lake.

Downtown, The Famous Mineral Water Company at 209 NW 6th St, (940) 325-8870, is the last of the dozens of drinking pavilions that made this town, bottling Crazy Water since 1904. The waters are sold by well depth, No. 4 being the strongest. You can fill your own containers inside the pavilion.

Most people drive to Waco for Magnolia and leave without seeing the better thing. Waco Mammoth National Monument is a climate controlled shelter built directly over an in situ fossil bed, with a walkway looking down on Columbian mammoths still lying in the ground where they were found. Access to the dig shelter is by guided tour only, the tours leave every half hour from the welcome center, and no reservation is needed.

Magnolia Market at the Silos, 601 Webster Ave, (254) 265-8300, opens Monday through Saturday and closes Sunday, which catches out a lot of weekend visitors who assumed otherwise. Build the day around the mammoths and treat the silos as the afternoon.

Chandor Gardens at 711 W Lee Ave is the reason to make the short drive. English portrait painter Douglas Chandor built it from 1936 onward behind his house, mixing formal English beds with Chinese rockwork and waterfalls, and the city now runs it for $5 a head, free for children 12 and under. Self guided hours are Tuesday to Friday 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Saturday 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. and Sunday noon to 4 p.m. The mansion interior opens on the second Tuesday of the month.

The courthouse on the square is the other half. W. C. Dodson designed this one too and it was built between 1884 and 1886. The Doss Heritage and Culture Center at 1400 Texas Dr, (817) 599-6168, covers Parker County history Tuesday through Saturday and stays open until 8 p.m. on Thursday.

Palo Pinto Mountains opened to visitors on 1 March 2026 and held its ribbon cutting on 10 April, which makes it the one entry here that almost nobody in Fort Worth has done yet. It sits in the broken hill country of the Palo Pinto mountains around Tucker Lake, with 16 miles of multiuse trail open to hikers, cyclists and horses, about 1.25 miles of it built to ADA standard.

Go in understanding what a brand new park is. Facilities are thinner than at a century old site, the trail network is young, and shade is limited on the ridges. What you get in exchange is terrain that does not look like anywhere else within 80 miles of Fort Worth, and trails that are not worn into ruts yet.

The army established Fort Richardson on 26 November 1867 and named it for Civil War general Israel B. Richardson. It was the northernmost federal post in Texas, the anchor of a defensive line that ran south through Fort Griffin and Fort Concho, and it was occupied until 1878. Fifty five buildings went up here in total.

Seven of them survive and have been restored, including the post hospital, officers' quarters, the powder magazine, the morgue, the commissary, the guardhouse and the bakery. That is the pitch. You are not looking at a reconstruction or a diorama, you are walking into the actual hospital. At $4 a head it is the cheapest history on this list by a distance.

Wiseman House Chocolates has been making chocolate by hand in Hico since 1996, out of a Victorian house built in 1908. It is the anchor of a two block downtown that would otherwise be a place you drive through, and it is the reason the drive works.

The other reason is the argument. The Billy the Kid Museum at 114 N Pecan St makes the case that Ollie L. Roberts, known as Brushy Bill, who died in Hico in 1950, was the real Billy the Kid and that Pat Garrett shot somebody else. Treat it as a town's claim rather than settled history, which is exactly how it is fun. A fiberglass Billy stands at Pecan and 2nd for the photograph.

The 1896 courthouse sits in the middle of the square with independent shops, restaurants and bars on all four sides, and two universities feeding the whole thing. W. C. Dodson designed this one too, in Romanesque Revival rather than Second Empire, which makes three Dodson courthouses on this list. Beth Marie's Old Fashioned Ice Cream at 117 W Hickory St has been on the south side of the square since November 1998, in a building that dates to 1876.

The music is the real draw. Dan's Silverleaf at 103 N Industrial St, a short walk off the square, books touring and regional acts most nights of the week and is the venue locals name first. Check a calendar before you pick the date, because in Denton the night is the point.