"It's one of the best kept secrets in Texas, I think," Baylor cross country coach Todd Harbour once said about Cameron Park, a place he has trained in since the 1970s. He's right about the secret part. He's just not talking about the secret most Waco residents actually need to know.
Ask five people who ride or run Cameron Park regularly to name their favorite trail, and at least two will say Cool Runnings or Party Line. Both are real, both are excellent, and neither one sits inside the 416-acre municipal park that gives them their name. They're next door, on 66 acres of privately owned land that most Waco residents have ridden through for years without realizing they crossed a property line.
What You're Standing In When You Say "Cameron Park"
The park itself is old Waco, literally. Flora B. Cameron donated the first 100 acres, known as Proctor Springs, back in 1910, along with $5,000 for development and a stipulation that the land stay a public park permanently. It sits at the confluence of the Brazos and Bosque Rivers, and the landmarks inside it have names locals use like street addresses: Lovers Leap, where visitors have stood atop the cliffs for more than a century; Circle Point, perched 100 feet above the Brazos with a clear view toward downtown; and Emmons Cliff, a rolling stretch of cedar and oak.
The trail count depends on who you ask. The city's own trail rules page puts the system at roughly 26 miles. Other trail databases and outdoor guides land closer to 20. Nobody is lying. The park has grown in pieces over more than a hundred years, connector paths get counted differently depending on the map, and the honest answer is that the exact number moves depending on which kiosk you're standing at. What doesn't move is the free access. The William Cameron Park disc golf course, a 23-hole layout with holes designed by John Houck and Joey Harrell, costs nothing to play. The same goes for every hiking, running, and biking trail inside the park boundary. Hours run 6 a.m. to midnight, and there's no gate, no waiver, no club card required.
That free, no-questions-asked access is the baseline. It's also exactly what changes the moment you cross into the Ranch.
The Ranch Next Door
In 2014, Bicycle World owner Todd Behringer bought a rugged 66-acre tract just southwest of Cameron Park's formal boundary. Trails had already been crisscrossing the land for years, worn in by riders who treated the property line as more of a suggestion. Behringer's purchase turned an informal shortcut into something intentional: a privately owned, publicly accessible trail area that connects directly into Cameron Park's own network but answers to nobody's parks department.
Trent Dougherty, a former Baylor philosophy professor and president of the Waco Bicycle Club, has led the volunteer effort to clear it, build it, and keep it running. Under his watch, the club cleared out thick ligustrum brush, painted over graffiti on an old stone archway at the end of Adeline Drive, once part of a vacation home for a local businessman, and built out trails with names that tell you exactly what to expect. Cool Runnings drops riders down a rocky hill into a nearly vertical wooden wall, the kind of feature two Waco Bicycle Club members built themselves before ever riding it. Party Line is the downhill course, six ramps and about an 80-foot drop. The Phoenix Trail came later, a switchback built with steeply banked curves that Dougherty has walked personally while showing off new trail signage.
Waco Bicycle Club volunteers have put in close to 800 hours a year on maintenance across both the park and the Ranch, and over about fifteen years of work they've added roughly eight miles of new trail and ten bridges to the combined system, according to longtime club volunteer Rusty Hansgen. Access points sit right off Cameron Park Drive at trailheads called Lean-to, Weber Run, and Powder Monkey, which makes it easy to ride from the public park straight into private land without ever noticing the switch.
"I do think it's a bit of a hurdle when the trail dead-ends into an area where you have to stop and join the bike club or get a day pass," said Ray Lamb, a Baylor mountain bike instructor who bought a house on Adeline Drive next to the Ranch, describing the moment riders realize they've hit the property line.
The Waiver Nobody Mentions
That hurdle Lamb describes is the whole point of this piece. There's no fee to ride the Ranch, but there is paperwork. Visitors need to either join the Waco Bicycle Club, join the Waco Striders Club, or fill out a liability waiver online through bikecommander.com to get a day pass. It takes a minute, but it's a minute that catches people off guard precisely because nothing about the trail itself announces the change in ownership. There's no fence, no ticket booth, just a sign and an archway that most riders blow past at speed.
This matters for a simple reason: the Ranch is private land, and Behringer, as the owner, carries liability the city doesn't have to think about inside its own park. The waiver system exists to protect that arrangement, not to gatekeep the trails. Lamb himself said he appreciates the cleanup and the improvements. He just hasn't gotten around to signing up, so he sticks to the trails within the park proper, which tells you something about how many longtime Waco riders are quietly doing the same thing without realizing there's an easy fix.
One Weekend Each Spring
If trail running is more your speed than downhill riding, Cameron Park has its own fixture on the calendar. The Toughest 'N Texas Trail Runs returns to the park each spring, staged out of the Redwood Pavilion with distances covering everything from a 5K to a full 50K along the rocky, hilly, rooty terrain the park is known for. This year's edition ran on Saturday, April 18, with the 50K and 20-mile runners starting at 7 a.m. and the shorter distances following at 7:30. Packet pickup happens the Friday before at Waco Running Company on Franklin Avenue, a detail that matters if you're planning to run it next spring and don't want to be scrambling for a bib number on race morning.
Between the disc golf course, the trail runs, and the mountain bike scene split across public and private land, Cameron Park functions less like a single park and more like a small outdoor district with its own internal rules. Knowing where one system ends and the other begins is the difference between an afternoon ride that flows and one that stops cold at a trailhead you didn't expect.
For anyone weighing where in Waco to put down roots, this kind of detail rarely shows up on a listing sheet, but it shapes daily life just the same. A house within a short ride of Cameron Park Drive means access to both the free municipal trails and, with five minutes of paperwork, the more technical terrain next door. That's worth knowing before you assume every ride out your front door works the same way.
If you're thinking about what it actually feels like to live near a place like this, not just what the map shows, Vianey Suarez can walk you through it neighborhood by neighborhood. Let's Connect.
