Paul Winter - SETX Camping

Bald eagle perched over a Southeast Texas lake on a cold winter morning

Winter Camping in Southeast Texas — Cold Fronts, Eagles & Empty Campgrounds

Winter camping in Southeast Texas is the season most people write off and most campers who try it never forget. Nobody is going to mistake a SETX January for Colorado, but nobody should mistake it for summer either. The mosquitoes are mostly gone, the campgrounds are close to empty,…

Lake Tombigbee at sunset with pine forest reflected in the glassy water near Livingston Texas

Camp on Texas’ Oldest Indian Reservation — Lake Tombigbee Campground Near Livingston

Lake Tombigbee Campground is the campground near Lake Livingston that most people in Southeast Texas have driven right past without knowing it exists. It sits on the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas reservation — the oldest Indian reservation in the state — tucked into 26 acres of East Texas Piney…

Kayaker paddling the Neches River through cypress trees at Martin Dies Jr. State Park in East Texas

Kayaking Martin Dies Jr. State Park — Complete Paddling Trail Guide

Kayaking Martin Dies Jr. State Park is the paddling experience I keep coming back to more than any other in Southeast Texas. The Walnut Slough trail through the Walnut Ridge unit moves through some of the oldest growth river-bottom hardwood forest in the region — mammoth bald cypress trees…

Fall campsite in the Southeast Texas Piney Woods with autumn leaves and campfire at dusk

Fall Camping in Southeast Texas — The Complete Seasonal Guide

Fall camping in Southeast Texas is the best camping of the year. Not the most dramatic — that title belongs to Big Bend in February or Sam Rayburn in a bass tournament week. But for pure quality-of-life camping in SETX, the stretch from late September through November is when…

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Sam Rayburn Reservoir — The Complete Guide to Camping, Fishing & Recreation

Sam Rayburn Reservoir is the largest lake located entirely within Texas — 114,500 acres of East Texas Piney Woods water built on the Angelina River by the US Army Corps of Engineers between 1956 and 1965. Bassmaster Magazine has ranked it America’s best bass lake. It hosts more than…

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Camping at Stephen F. Austin State Park — The Complete Guide

Camping at Stephen F. Austin State Park puts you 40 miles west of Houston on 664 acres of Brazos River bottomland — one of the closest true state park camping experiences to the Houston metro and the one that most people west of the city overlook in favor of…

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Alligator Safety in Southeast Texas — What Every Camper Needs to Know

Alligator safety in Southeast Texas is one of those topics that gets either wildly over-dramatized or completely dismissed. The truth is somewhere straightforward in the middle: American alligators are real, they’re present throughout SETX waterways, and they’re genuinely not dangerous to people who understand a few basic things about…

Fisherman casting into a cypress cove on B.A. Steinhagen Lake in the East Texas Piney Woods

Fishing at B.A. Steinhagen Lake — Species, Spots & Techniques Guide

Fishing at B.A. Steinhagen Lake is built around two completely different environments — the shallow, vegetation-heavy main reservoir and the river channels above it. Most anglers who fish Steinhagen fish one or the other and miss what makes the other one good. The main lake is catfish and crappie…

Father and child fishing from a pier on Lake Livingston at golden hour in Southeast Texas

Fishing at Lake Livingston — Species, Spots & Seasons Guide

Fishing at Lake Livingston is built around two things the lake does better than most reservoirs in Southeast Texas: white bass and catfish. The white bass run up the Trinity River tributaries in early spring is one of the most consistent numbers-of-fish events on any SETX lake. The blue…

Surf fisherman fighting a fish in the Gulf of Mexico at Bolivar Peninsula on the Texas Gulf Coast

Fishing at Bolivar Peninsula — Surf, Jetty & Bay Complete Guide

Fishing at Bolivar Peninsula covers three completely different environments within a few miles of each other — 27 miles of Gulf beach for surf fishing, the North Jetty for structure fishing into the Galveston Channel, and the bay side with access to East Galveston Bay’s marshes, flats, and channels.…