If you run, walk, or bike the lake, you already know the story of this summer: the trail along Garland Road disappeared behind orange fencing in June, and the full loop around White Rock Lake stopped existing for the first time in longer than most of us can remember. What you may not know is that Lake Highlands already had a second trail corridor waiting in the wings, finished just months before the lake closure started, and it doesn't depend on the lake at all.
That second fact matters more than the first. Here's why.
What actually closed, and why
The section that closed ran along Garland Road between East Lawther Drive and White Rock Creek, plus the stretch of White Rock Lake Trail between East Lawther and Winsted Drives. The cause was an abandoned 36-inch wastewater main, roughly 2,800 feet of it, sitting beneath the trail near the spillway. A sinkhole opened over the line earlier this year, and Dallas Water Utilities decided the fix wasn't a patch job. It was grouting the entire abandoned pipe to prevent the ground from opening up again later.
District 9 Councilmember Paula Blackmon flagged the timeline in her May 29 newsletter: mobilization the week of June 15, with the contractor working 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Monday through Saturday, for an estimated two to three months. That put the reopening somewhere in the August to September range from the start, and it landed on the early end. The trail and the closed lane of Garland Road were both cleared for public use again by Friday, August 7.
The two and a half months without a loop
For anyone who treats the lake as their default route, this wasn't a minor inconvenience. There wasn't a way to detour around the closed segment and still complete the loop. The city closed East Lawther Drive to vehicles between Garland Road and Winfrey Point Way specifically so trail users had somewhere to go, but that's a workaround, not a substitute. If your Saturday morning routine was eight miles around the water, you spent most of the summer doing something else, or doing half the lake and turning around at the spillway.
That's the part of the story every neighbor already lived through. The part worth knowing now is what else was happening a few miles away, on a trail most people don't think about until they're standing on it.
The trail nobody was talking about
Months before Dallas Water Utilities ever touched the lake trail, a separate and unrelated project quietly wrapped up a few miles inland: the Phase 2 extension of the Lake Highlands Trail. This one doesn't circle water. It's a new concrete path that connects the White Rock Creek Trail at Harry S. Moss Park to Arbor Park along Skillman, cutting through green space, utility easements, and street rights-of-way to link a large stretch of the neighborhood that previously had no dedicated trail connection at all.
The engineering firm Dunaway built it in partnership with the City of Dallas, and it includes a few details that make it more than a paved shortcut. There's a signalized pedestrian crossing and gateway at Abrams Road, plus elevated boardwalk sections designed specifically to get walkers and cyclists across floodplain areas without waiting for water levels to cooperate. It also finishes a connection that's been on the city's list for a while: linking the trail segments near Lake Highlands High School to the Lake Highlands DART station.
Transit access has been part of the plan for years. Back in October 2023, Dallas City Council approved an additional $400,000 for the broader Lake Highlands Trail project, on top of the original $4.4 million contract with Frisco-based RoeschCo Construction, to fund updates at the trail's DART Walnut Hill Station intersection, added drainage structures to keep the trail from flooding, handrails, and fencing along Skillman Street. This was never a quick add-on. It was a multi-year capital project, and the version that opened last winter is what finally put a usable trail behind the lake's more famous loop.
Put those two projects side by side and you get a version of Lake Highlands that simply didn't exist a few years ago:
- A lake loop that still requires the full circuit around White Rock Lake, dependent on Garland Road and the trail segments the city maintains around the water
- A second, separate corridor connecting Harry S. Moss Park to Arbor Park, with a direct link to the DART station and safer crossings at Abrams Road
- Two systems that no longer overlap in a way that makes one dependent on the other being open
If you only ever loop the lake, you might not have registered that a second option now exists a short drive or ride away. If your closure-summer routine involved a lot of frustrated shrugging at the detour signs on Garland Road, it's worth knowing that a genuine alternative exists now, not as a stopgap, but as a finished piece of infrastructure with its own bridge crossing, its own drainage engineering, and its own transit connection.
What's different now that the lake loop is back
With the trail and the Garland Road lane both reopened as of August 7, the full lake circuit is walkable and bikeable again without a workaround. That's the headline most residents wanted. But the more useful takeaway is that Lake Highlands now has two trail systems instead of one, and they serve different purposes. The lake loop is the scenic, high-traffic route people already know. The Lake Highlands Trail extension is the quieter, more direct route for anyone commuting toward DART or simply looking for a way to get from the Skillman corridor to Harry S. Moss Park without getting in a car.
If you've been avoiding the trail all summer because of the construction, this is the moment to go check both. The lake will still be crowded on a Saturday morning. The Skillman extension, at least for now, won't be.
A few other things worth knowing before you head out
If your route takes you past the Bike Mart and Good Records strip on Garland Road, keep an eye out. Norma's Cafe filed for a certificate of occupancy at 9004 Garland Road in that same shopping strip earlier this year, which typically means a build-out is underway ahead of an opening. It's not confirmed yet, but it's the kind of filing that's worth watching if you're already walking past that block regularly.
And if you're plotting your fall calendar now that the loop is whole again, the Old Lake Highlands Neighborhood Association runs two events that pair naturally with a trail habit: the Turkey Trot, a 5K loop through the neighborhood on Thanksgiving morning that finishes with coffee at Middle Ground, and the White Rock Lake Artists' Studio Tour, a self-guided fall weekend when working studios around the lake open their doors to the public. Neither requires you to be in the market for anything. They're just good reasons to be outside in a neighborhood that, as of this month, has more ways to get there than it did in June.
I live and work in this part of Dallas, and I write about what's actually changing here, not what a template says a neighborhood guide should cover. If you're weighing a move into Lake Highlands or wondering what a home near either trail corridor is worth right now, Evelyn Escuadra can walk you through it in English or Spanish. Schedule a free home valuation whenever you're ready to talk specifics.
