Walkway of Lights

Lakeside Park, on Lake Marble Falls, is the home of the Walkway of Lights, a Christmas display that began in 1990 with some lit persimmon trees and grew into more than two million lights. It was the idea of Ron Mitchell, a Horseshoe Bay resident who had seen Austin's Trail of Lights and wanted a display in Marble Falls that would make the water glow, and he worked with Pat Burton, who brought in the persimmons, and a larger group of volunteers to set up the first one. It now fills the park with more than a hundred light sculptures and draws upward of forty thousand visitors a season. A parade was added in 2006 and an outdoor ice rink in 2020.

For thirty five years the display belonged to the Marble Falls Area Chamber of Commerce, which ran it with volunteers. On 2 June 2026 the city council voted to buy it for 175,000 dollars and keep it in the park, with the city paying 25,000 dollars at closing and 10,000 a year through 2031, and the Marble Falls Economic Development Corporation covering the other 100,000. The ice rink had cost about 160,000 dollars a year to run, and the city dropped it for the 2026 season to spend on more lights.

For most of the year the park is simply a lakeside lawn just upstream of the US 281 bridge. Lake Marble Falls itself is a reservoir, formed in 1951 when the dam now called Max Starcke Dam drowned the falls that gave the town its name.