Drive past the entrance on Faulkner Road during a certain stretch of years and you would have seen a wide bowl of cracked mud where a lake should have been. Boats sat on trailers instead of water. Campers who booked lakefront sites showed up to find their site backed up to a dry basin full of weeds. If you lived in Belden during that window, it would have been reasonable to write the park off as the place with the broken lake, worth a drive-by but not a Saturday.
That version of Trace State Park does not exist anymore, and hasn't for a while. What's easy to miss, if your mental picture froze somewhere around 2018, is how much has changed since the water came back and how much of the park was never about the lake in the first place.
Three Years of Mud, Explained
The lake at Trace State Park was drained in 2017 so crews could repair the dam, and it stayed empty long enough that regular visitors started describing the park by what was missing rather than what was there. It reopened in August 2020, and the Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal covered the recovery in real time, reporting that repairs were finished by mid-November of that stretch and that heavy rainfall was pushing water back toward the boat ramp faster than expected. The park's own fisheries staff at the time said they were hoping for a full pool by spring if the rains kept up.
They got their wish, and then some. The lake sits at 565 acres today, the same footprint it held before the drawdown, and it has been back to normal water levels for long enough that recent visitor reports describe boats, jet skis, and a busy fishing shoreline rather than a construction zone. In January 2025, Mississippi Department of Wildlife, Fisheries, and Parks crews placed seven new fish attractors around the lake, adding to structure they'd already built out in 2018 and 2019. The lake is known historically for bream, and it currently carries a healthy bass population alongside seasonal crappie and catfish.
If your last visit predates 2020, you were looking at a park in the middle of a multi-year repair. The park that exists now is a different one.
What's Actually Running Right Now
Strip away the memory of the drained years and here's the current inventory: a full 565-acre lake open to boating and fishing, two 18-hole disc golf courses, a horse barn with overnight stalls, and two separate trail systems that serve completely different users. The Old Warrior Run course holds a specific distinction as the first long-arm disc golf course built in north Mississippi, and it runs alongside a second course, Trace Gold, giving the park two full rounds without repeating a hole.
Worth knowing before you show up expecting one trail network: Trace actually runs two of them, and they are not interchangeable.
Two Trail Systems, Not One
The first is a 35-mile combined-use network built for off-road vehicles, mountain bikes, hikers, and horses sharing the same corridors through mixed hardwood forest and rolling hills. If you're on this system, you're sharing the trail with ATVs, and riders on motorized vehicles need a valid driver's license or an ATV safety certificate to be there legally.
The second is quieter. The park's nature trail complex runs more than 17 miles, is limited to hikers and mountain bikers only, and is covered by the park's standard $2 day-use entry fee rather than a separate ORV permit. This is the system most Belden residents actually mean when they say they're "going to ride Trace." It's also where the named singletrack loops live, maintained over the years by two volunteer groups, the Northeast Mississippi Cycling Club and the North Mississippi Trail Alliance, who rebuilt and expanded much of the network after storm damage took out trails at a nearby park in 2014.
Three Loops, and When Each One Makes Sense
Three named trails make up most of the mileage on the quiet system, and each one has a different personality once you're on it.
| Trail | Rough distance | Character | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nester | 4 to 5 miles | Loops from just inside the park entrance out to the dam and back, minimal climbing | A quick after-work loop when daylight is short |
| Baker's | About 5 miles | Runs along part of the old hiking trail, with fast downhill sections and real climbs mixed in | Riders who want more of a workout without driving far |
| Moroney | About 6 miles | Starts near the rear boat ramp, formerly known as the Boat Ramp Trail, longest of the three | A full-morning ride or a longer walk with the dog |
None of these are technical trails in the mountain-bike sense. Reviewers consistently describe the network as fast and flowing rather than gnarly, with no major hill climbs and no highly technical sections. That's part of why it works as a weeknight option and not just a weekend destination.
The Race That Proves the Trail Community Showed Up
A park doesn't stay maintained on hope alone, and the clearest evidence that Trace's trail system gets real attention is the Tupelo Trail Shuffle, an annual race that returns this year for its fifth running on November 21, 2026. Runners choose between a 10K and a 20K, both mostly on the singletrack nature trail rather than the ORV network, with the course tracing hardwood timber and old-growth pine along partial views of the lake. The 10K climbs roughly 400 feet, the 20K about 900, numbers organizers describe as rolling rather than punishing, with a four-hour cutoff generous enough that a hiker could complete the shorter distance on foot.
Race weekend lands during peak fall foliage in north Mississippi, which is not an accident. Packet pickup happens the day before at Core Cycle and Outdoor in Tupelo, and a share of race proceeds goes directly to the Mississippi State Parks Fund, money that comes back into trail upkeep at parks like this one. Local sponsors including MasterCraft Builders and Geno's Tire Pros have backed the event in recent years, the kind of support that only shows up around something a community actually uses.
One More Thing Worth Knowing
Trace State Park's mailing address puts it in Belden, but the park itself sits just over the county line in Pontotoc County, roughly seven miles from each town center. That split explains why you'll sometimes hear it referred to as the Pontotoc park in one conversation and the Belden park in the next. Functionally, it belongs to both, and neither Belden nor Pontotoc residents have to drive far to reach it.
Putting a Fall Weekend Together
None of this requires a plan more complicated than picking the right piece for the day you're having. A short window after work fits Nester's loop out to the dam. A morning with more time and a little more ambition points toward Baker's or Moroney. A family outing with kids who'd rather throw a disc than hike a trail has two full 18-hole courses to choose from without leaving the property. And if you haven't cast a line into Trace Lake since before the drawdown, the fish attractors state crews placed in January 2025 give you a specific reason to find out what's biting.
The park spent three years being defined by what was missing. It's been back and running for longer than that gap lasted, with a lake at full pool, two active trail systems, and a race calendar entry that draws people in from outside the county to run through it. If your picture of Trace still includes a dry lakebed, it's worth an updated visit before the leaves peak this November.
Belden residents thinking through what else has changed close to home, whether that's a park, a road project, or the value of the house you're already sitting in, can always reach out to the local team at Sherrie Springer KW Tupelo for a grounded, no-pressure read on the neighborhood.
