Anyone who’s been to Dallas is familiar with the car culture that defines movement in the city. While there is public transit, and a lot of folks do count on it, Dallas is not what most people would consider “walkable.”
But that didn’t stop Jeffrey McWhorter from lacing up his boots, grabbing his camera and hitting the road by foot last spring. McWhorter grew up in Dallas, and he said he was raised to love outdoor adventure.
“Ever since I was a kid, I sought out adventure in what I would call the in-between spaces of the city, often leading me to plan these slightly hair-brained, oddball urban adventures,” he said. “One day I was sitting at my computer looking at the map of the city limits of Dallas, which is kind of an odd shape, and I drew a line on Google Maps from the very tippy top to the very bottom, which was 28 miles, and thought, ‘I bet I could walk that in a day.’”
He ended up splitting the journey into two days and walking 52 miles across the city, since he didn’t go in a straight line.
“I actually started in the south. I walked from south to north. The southernmost point is Lancaster High School, Wintergreen Road, south of I-20,” he said. “And the very top is just north of the President George Bush Turnpike.
McWhorter said the prospect of having a day with no plans but to walk was appealing to him.
“There was a real sense of joy and optimism and excitement. And I started at the crack of dawn on May 10, 2025,” he said. “There weren’t that many people out, especially down in that area. It’s pretty industrial, but I encountered my first people probably three or four miles in.”
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Over the course of the trip, McWhorter took photos of objects that caught his eye and interviewed people he met.
“I found a basketball impaled on a fence post. I remember a red tie,” he said. “One, I thought this was kind of interesting, this is a typical thing to see on the streets of Dallas, it was a squirrel smashed with all of its guts everywhere, but it was right outside the fence of Jerry Jones’s house on Preston Road.”
All in, McWhorter spoke to 231 people and interviewed 60 of them.
“Every encounter was its own little story, its own vignette,” he said. “I went to Lake Cliff Park, which is in North Oak Cliff, and that was a really neat moment because it was a bit serendipitous. I kind of chose at the last minute to take a left across this little bridge off of Corinth Road, ended up in Lake Cliff Park and stumbled upon the Oak Cliff Sandlot League, which was a bunch of adults out there playing sandlot baseball.”
McWhorter also met students, workers and people experiencing homelessness.
“I met the Wilmer-Hutchins High School Marching Music Machine, their marching band, a few of them were out fundraising,” he said. “And then seven hours later I met Anthony Hall who I believe was 63 years old sleeping in a blue sleeping bag at a pergola overlooking downtown and he was homeless and as I talked to him, I learned that he at one time had played in the Wilmer-Hutchins Marching Band.”
Reflecting on his experience, McWhorter called this project his love letter to Dallas.
“Another thing I have noticed is, it’s been several months since I did this walk, and as I now drive around the city, taking my kids to and from school, driving to Half Price Books, things like that, all the time, I’ll drive past a spot and be like, ‘I walked right there,'” he said. “And I feel a certain connection to that specific place that I didn’t before.”
