sue.
Bell was quoted as being grateful for the way the visitors filtered in in the first few days.
“If we had had the crowd Friday that we had Sunday, it would have been difficult, to say the least,” Bell said. “Friday was a good beginning, and Saturday was a little better. Sunday was great.”
North of the lake, the Johnson Branch Unit took until late 1996 to come online.
“Everything just kind of came together real quick,” said Russell Fishbeck, the Ray Roberts Lake State Park superintendent at the time, in the Dec. 5, 1996, issue. “We’re still fine-tuning and tweaking things.”
The satellite parks came online in different phases as well.
During construction, one of the officials said they hoped to see the park realize its true potential.
Today, Ray Roberts Lake State Park is perennially in the Top 10 most visited parks just by competing against the whole battery of the Texas state parks.
“Ray Roberts is always pretty high
It has also played host to the Bassmaster Classic, dubbed the Super Bowl of fishing, twice in recent years.
In 2025’s Classic, Easton Fothergill finished with a total of 76-pounds 15-ounces, breaking Kevin VanDam’s record of 69-pounds, 11-ounces set in 2011, en route to becoming the second- youngest champion in the classic’s 55-year history, according to the
Post-Signal
archives.
“There’s always an uptick, even more than the individuals, you see more bass tournaments coming out, and those folks, just because they can say they fished the same lake as the Classic,” Merritt said.
The Ray Roberts crew continually comes up with plans for how to improve the park complex and its offerings for the visitors.
Looking to the future, the state park system is trying to work with the cities of Denton and Dallas to ensure that it will maintain the relationship with those entities and be able to keep providing outdoor opportunities for the public for decades to come.
