Walk the paved loop at Stone Oak Park on a weekday evening and you'll pass a metal grate bolted into a limestone opening no bigger than a manhole, tucked just off the trail near the north parking lot. Most people jog right by it. The grate marks the entrance to Bear Cave, named for the bones of a bear once found in its dark chamber, one of two publicly visible cave mouths sitting inside a city park that most Stone Oak residents know only as the place with the loop.
That loop has been part of the neighborhood's daily rhythm for two decades. What sits just off it has not gotten the same attention, and for a specific, fixable reason. For the better part of the last two years, getting to the park and moving comfortably once you were there involved two separate frustrations that had nothing to do with each other. Both of those frustrations resolved on their own timelines, and the second one wrapped up last month. Right now, for the first time in a while, neither is in your way.
What's Actually Under the Loop
Bear Cave and its smaller neighbor, Cub Cave, sit near the northern section of Stone Oak Park, reachable by crossing Stone Oak Parkway from the main lot and following the trail a couple of minutes north. Both openings are sealed with heavy metal grates, a response to the fact that people once used Bear Cave as an informal rock-climbing spot. You can still see old bolts in the sloping ceiling if you look. You cannot go in, and you shouldn't try.
The caves exist because of the same limestone that defines this whole stretch of the Edwards Plateau. Rainwater drains through cracks, sinkholes, and cave openings like these two into the aquifer below, which is why the San Antonio Water System uses this exact park as the first stop on its public Rain-to-Drain tour, walking visitors through how recharge actually works here rather than somewhere abstract. It is also why signage near the trailhead warns hikers that mountain lions and bobcats have been spotted in the area, a detail that surprises people who think of Stone Oak as fully built out. The undeveloped natural area north of the parkway has never fully caught up to the subdivisions around it, and that gap is the whole point.
Keep walking toward the flood control dam and, if you time it for early evening, you can catch the gold spire of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints temple through the tree line, its angel Moroni catching the last direct light of the day. It is not marked on any trail map. You find it by being there at the right hour.
Closer to the parking lot, the park's HealthBeat Outdoor Fitness System runs along the trail between the playground and an outdoor classroom and amphitheater that community groups can reserve. None of this is new. What's new is how much easier it now is to actually get out there and use it.
Two Repairs That Finally Overlapped
The Stone Oak North Loop trail, the short paved section closest to the caves and the dam, went through a full resurfacing as part of the city's 2022-27 bond program, with the old asphalt replaced by concrete and narrower sections widened where funding allowed. Construction started in fall 2024 and was substantially finished in the opening months of 2025, so the surface under your feet on the north loop today is closer to a year and a half old rather than the patched, root-heaved asphalt that was there before.
For most of that same year and a half, though, getting to the park meant sitting through construction on Stone Oak Parkway itself. The city had been planning intersection work at Stone Oak Parkway and Evans Road, and at Stone Oak Parkway and Hardy Oak Boulevard, since at least 2023, driven partly by a documented 31 vehicle accidents recorded between 2018 and 2022 in the Evans Road, Peacemaker, and Bush Middle School stretch alone. That $5 million bond-funded project finally reached the Evans Road segment this year, with construction running from March 23 through late July 2026. It wrapped last month.
So for roughly a year, the park had a freshly poured trail but an approach still choked with lane closures. Now both pieces are done at the same time, which hasn't been true since before the resurfacing started. If you drove past the caves in 2025 because the intersection made the trip more trouble than it was worth, that specific reason no longer applies.
Getting the Route Right the First Time
Stone Oak Park and its adjoining natural area, centered on the trailhead at 20395 Stone Oak Parkway, actually contain three distinct trail options rather than one generic loop:
- Stone Oak North Loop — 1.2 miles, about 39 feet of elevation gain, closest to both caves and the dam, roughly a 30-minute walk. This is the section that just got the concrete resurfacing.
- Stone Oak South Trail — 3.1 miles out and back, about 91 feet of gain, shaded early on with more sun exposure toward the turnaround, closer to an hour round trip.
- Stone Oak South to North Trail — 3.6 miles, the longest option at about 170 feet of gain, connecting both sections and including the park's one designated stretch for off-trail biking.
Both cave entrances sit within about a two-minute walk of the north parking area, on the far side of the parkway crossing. If you're bringing kids or a dog on a leash, the north loop by itself covers the caves, the dam, and the fitness stations without committing to the longer connector trail.
Why This Matters If You Already Live Here
None of this changes anything about home values or timing a sale. It's not that kind of update. What it does is close a gap that's existed for a while between what people assume is in their own backyard and what's actually there. A city park that most residents drive past twice a day turns out to hold two real caves, a working flood control dam, an aquifer education stop the water utility uses as a teaching example, and a sightline to a temple spire that nobody advertises. For most of the past two years, the practical friction of getting there and moving comfortably once you arrived was reason enough to skip it. That friction is gone now, on both ends, at the same time, for what appears to be the first stretch since the work began.
If you're weighing what else has shifted in the neighborhood recently, from new storefronts along Stone Oak Parkway to the retail corridor's broader refresh, that's a separate conversation worth having, and one we've covered in more detail in our look at what's new around Stone Oak. But the park sitting quietly in the middle of it all deserves its own visit, particularly this month, while the pavement is still new and the road getting you there isn't torn up anymore.
Trinie Ortiz Johnson has spent years working the Stone Oak market from the inside, which means paying attention to the small, unglamorous details that make a neighborhood function day to day, not just the ones that show up in a listing photo. If you're weighing a move in or around Stone Oak and want a broker who actually knows the difference between the trail and what's underneath it, Trinie Johnson is a call away for a Request a Confidential Consultation.
