Martin Dies Jr. State Park

Jasper Texas
December 30, 2010

This was a nice surprise. We were not expecting much but had a good time at this park. We were really surprised at how big this park was. It has 180 camping sites and 50 air conditioned cabins. The park is split into two sections by Highway 190. We stayed on the Hen House Ridge side of the park but did a tour of the Walnut Ridge Unit as well. The park HQ is on the Hen House side, but the nature center is on the Walnut Ridge side.

Highway 190 goes to Jasper an crosses the huge BA Steinhagen reservoir (15,000 acres). I would not recommend cross the reservoir pulling your camper. It's two lanes with out any shoulders. There are tons of logging trucks using this route and they are just like 18 wheelers when passing. They tend to blow you around a little. We missed the turn into the park and had to cross the reservoir which was several miles of white knuckle driving.

The park has several swamp areas and some shoreline to the reservoir. There are alligators present, but because of the time of year, we didn't see any. There were lots of canoers fishing the swamps and shoreline.

The pull through sites were in good shape and large enough for our rig. We did have some trouble pulling in because of all the pine needles covering the pad and driveway. We had to sweep it off first so we knew where to go.

We some hiking and lots of bicycling in this park. However, we didn't attempt to cross HW 190 with our bikes. It was too busy to

attempt. So, we drove over to visit the other side. We went to look into the nature center because we knew it was closed and we scared someone that was inside doing some inventory. She was the nature center's director and opened the center to us and gave us a private tour. She has to be the nicest state park employee we have ever encountered. She made our day / visit.