Barnett Park and the Pine Hills Trail: 159 Acres of Weekends
BMX, disc golf, a splash pad, a fishing pier and a Coast-to-Coast trailhead — Pine Hills' signature park, and how to build a day around it.
3 minute read
Every neighborhood deserves a park big enough to get lost in, and Pine Hills has one of the biggest in Orange County. Barnett Park — formally Gordon Barnett Park — spreads across 159 acres at 4801 W. Colonial Drive, just east of Pine Hills Road on the neighborhood’s southern edge, wrapped around the lake the county lists as Lawne Lake. It is Pine Hills’ signature green space: part sports complex, part lake park, part trailhead, and the everyday backyard for tens of thousands of west-side families.
What 159 acres holds
The county’s inventory for Barnett Park reads like a parks department showing off. There is a BMX track — a real one, part of the park’s identity for riders across the region — and disc golf courses that draw players from across the metro. Ball fields and courts cover the league sports: softball, basketball inside and out, tennis and sand volleyball. A recreation center with a gym anchors the indoor side. Families get playgrounds, a splash pad, picnic pavilions and a dog park. And the lake gets its due: a fishing pier and a boat ramp, with bank fishing around the park’s pond and shoreline. Few Orlando parks stack this many constituencies into one fence line without any of them feeling like an afterthought; Barnett manages it by sheer acreage.
The Pine Hills Trail
The park is also a trailhead. The Pine Hills Trail, a multi-use path developed as part of Florida’s Coast-to-Coast Trail system, runs through the neighborhood in a utility corridor — its first phase, opened in 2017, covers about two and a half miles from Alhambra Drive to Silver Star Road, with a spur of roughly three-quarters of a mile connecting into Barnett Park. The county’s master plan extends it north from Silver Star Road to Clarcona-Ocoee Road and onward toward the Seminole-Wekiva Trail, and south toward the Shingle Creek Regional Trail — about eight miles in full, and a link in the 250-mile Coast-to-Coast route across Florida. For Pine Hills residents it is already something simpler and more valuable: a paved, car-free way to walk, run, ride and skate through their own neighborhood, ending at their own park.
A Barnett Park day, done right
Start on the trail in the cool of the morning and come into the park by the spur. Walk the paved loop around the facilities — an easy, flat circuit of a little over a mile if you take the full Barnett Park Loop — then pick your sport: a round of disc golf, a BMX session, a fishing hour off the pier. Families should time the splash pad for late morning and take a pavilion for lunch. And because this is Pine Hills, lunch has an upgrade path: the West Colonial corridor is five minutes away, which means the post-park meal can be oxtail at Caribbean Supercenter or a patty run at Golden Krust. Our Where to Eat in Pine Hills roundup is the menu; the park is the excuse.
Next door: the fairgrounds
Barnett Park shares its stretch of Colonial with the Central Florida Fairgrounds, immediately adjacent — which means the park’s biggest neighbor wakes up every late winter for the Central Florida Fair, and hosts expo-hall events the rest of the year. We cover that calendar in Fair Season on West Colonial. On fair days, the park-and-fair combination makes this the busiest recreational corner on Orlando’s west side.
The local’s park
Theme-park Orlando will never find Barnett Park, and that is fine. This is a working county park for a working neighborhood — league nights, birthday pavilions, morning walkers, BMX kids, disc golfers and anglers sharing 159 acres without friction. Put it on your Orlando Top Spots Map as the green anchor of Pine Hills, and use it the way the neighborhood does: often, casually, and with lunch on Colonial afterward.
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