The North Dallas Trail That Hires Goats Instead of Landscapers

Sometime this fall, if the pattern holds, a shepherd and a pair of Border Collies will walk 400 goats and sheep onto the Northaven Trail near US-75 and start moving west. The animals will eat their way through waist-high grass one meadow at a time, at a pace of roughly one to six acres a day, while a GPS tracker on one member of the flock lets anyone with a phone follow along in real time. Neighbors will show up with strollers and iced coffees to watch. Somebody will post a video that gets more views than anything the city's own parks department puts out that week.

It looks like a stunt. It is actually the clearest evidence of how this trail gets built.

What the goats are for, specifically

The Northaven Trail has fifty designated "no-mow" wildflower zones spread across its length. Thirty of those zones get the goat treatment each year through a program the trail's nonprofit calls Northaven TAILS. The animals, a mix of Dorper and Katahdin sheep alongside Spanish, Boer, and Alpine goats, chew down the tangled thatch layer that builds up over a growing season, and their hooves aerate the soil as they go, which sets up better germination for next spring's wildflowers than a mower or an herbicide spray would.

Friends of Northaven Trail, the volunteer nonprofit that runs the program, raised about $16,476 in a recent season specifically to cover the cost of bringing the flock in, working alongside the Dallas Parks Department and a land-clearing company called Open Space to make it happen. That is not a rounding error in a city budget. That is a bake-sale-sized number that a group of neighbors put together themselves because nobody else was going to pay for it.

This is the pattern that runs underneath everything else on this trail, and it is worth understanding if you live near it, because it changes what the fall calendar actually means.

Nine miles that started as a sidewalk fund

The Northaven Trail did not begin as a city priority. It began because a district council member named Lee Kleinman wanted a trail and had no money for one, so he started an advocacy group modeled on the ones already supporting the Katy Trail and the Preston Ridge Trail. The break came when someone noticed that roughly $2 million in leftover 2006 bond money, earmarked for sidewalks on Royal Lane that neighbors there didn't actually want, could be reprogrammed for a similar kind of amenity. Construction started in 2009 on a two-mile stretch between Valleydale Drive and Preston Road.

That original two miles is now nine, running from Central Expressway to near Denton Drive, and it passes through or borders neighborhoods including Preston Hollow, Northaven Park, Janmar, and Hillcrest Forest. Building it out cost somewhere around a million dollars per mile, which sounds steep until you compare it to what a city recreation center costs to build and staff. Once a trail is down, it needs almost none of that ongoing overhead, which is part of why a volunteer group with a fundraising calendar can keep it running at all.

The bridge that made five trails into one system

The most expensive single piece of this trail is a bridge, and it is worth knowing what it actually connects. In November 2023, crews spent twenty hours over one weekend maneuvering a 201-foot cable-span structure into place over eight lanes of US-75. The project cost roughly $20 million, funded mostly by TxDOT and the North Central Texas Council of Governments, and it links the Northaven Trail to four others at once: the Cottonwood Creek Trail, the White Rock Creek Trail, the Preston Ridge Trail, and the Central Trail in Richardson. Locals call the intersection point the Low Five. The bridge also puts North Dallas within a short ride of the DART Red Line, and its eight support pillars carry murals by Dallas artist Chera Creative depicting the flora and fauna you'll actually see along the path.

If you've ridden from Preston Hollow out toward White Rock Lake without stopping to check a map, this bridge is the reason that was possible.

A fall calendar that doubles as a maintenance budget

Once you see the funding pattern, the trail's event calendar reads differently. Here is what typically shows up on it between now and the end of the year:

• Northaven TAILS, the goat and sheep grazing event, usually arriving in October and lasting anywhere from a few days to a few weeks depending on how fast the herd works. Check the trail's own event listings for this year's exact start date.
• North Texas Giving Day, the trail nonprofit's single biggest fundraising day of the year, typically held in September alongside the region-wide giving campaign.
• Movie Night on the Trail, a family screening with dessert donated by sponsors that have included Corner Bakery on Preston and Forest and the Shake Shack at Preston Royal.
• The Bagel Run, a long-running community race hosted by the Aaron Family Jewish Community Center of Dallas that draws runners, walkers, and families for a morning that ends in bagels rather than medals.
• Deck the Bridge and the Light the Trail Party, the winter capstones, the latter featuring Santa arriving via Dallas Fire Station 41, food from Urban Crust Pizza, Top Pot Doughnuts, and Frost Gelato, and a raffle with prizes donated by neighborhood businesses like Central Market and Northaven Gardens.

None of these events is purely decorative. Every one of them either raises money directly for trail upkeep or exists because a local business agreed to sponsor it in exchange for goodwill with the exact customers who walk past their storefront every week. Flower Child at Preston Royal has hosted post-ride group lunches for the trail's cycling meetups and kicks 20 percent of those sales back to the nonprofit. North Haven Gardens, the nursery near the Freda Stern rest area, shows up both as a landmark on the map and as a raffle donor at the holiday party. Cindi's Deli, near the eastern trailhead, is the kind of stop locals mention when they're giving directions rather than reading them off a sign.

What this means if you use the trail this fall

The Northaven Trail now sees more than 30,000 users a month, according to the nonprofit that tracks it, up from a widely cited figure of roughly 30,000 for the entire month of June 2020, back when the pandemic first pushed Dallas outdoors. That growth in usage has tracked almost exactly with growth in trail mileage, and both have tracked with the calendar of fundraisers that keep Friends of Northaven Trail solvent enough to plant wildflowers, fix erosion, and eventually push construction further toward Denton Drive.

So the goats are not just a good photo. Neither is the bagel run, or the Santa arriving on a fire truck, or the twenty percent kickback at Flower Child. Each one is a small, specific transaction that keeps a piece of public infrastructure growing in a city where public infrastructure does not always grow on its own. If you live within walking distance of this trail, showing up to one of these events this season is not a departure from your normal routine. It is, in a fairly literal sense, how your normal routine gets to keep expanding.

For homeowners thinking about how a neighborhood's amenities hold up over time, this is the kind of detail that matters more than a square footage number ever will. A trail that a community keeps building with its own fundraising, one goat-grazing season at a time, tends to keep its value the same way.

If you're weighing a move near the Northaven Trail corridor, or wondering what a home in Preston Hollow or North Dallas is actually worth this fall, the Mark Bradford Group can walk you through the numbers with the same local specificity. Request a Free Home Valuation and get a read on your property that accounts for what's actually happening in the neighborhood, not just the citywide average.