Cross the wooden bridge at Anderson Park, follow the packed gravel loop past the pasture fence, and you'll eventually hit a crosswalk on Del Monte Lane. On the other side, the trail keeps going. Most people who park at Anderson Park never notice that crosswalk leads anywhere. Most people who drive into Bartley Ranch Regional Park off Lakeside Drive never realize there's a second park attached to the far end of their walk. They're the same system, joined by a two-mile stretch of flat, county-maintained trail that almost nobody treats as one continuous place.
That's the small discovery. The bigger one is what used to run underneath both of them, and still does.
Two Parks, One Trail, One Crosswalk
Anderson Park sits on 70 acres of open ranchland off Yoakam Lane, mostly undeveloped by design. There's a two-acre picnic area at the southeast corner and a four-acre one at the northern edge, but no restrooms and no real infrastructure. What it has is a packed-dirt loop that circles an irrigated pasture where cattle graze close enough to photograph, and a network of multi-use trails that head north.
Follow that trail far enough and it becomes the Ranch Loop Trail inside Bartley Ranch Regional Park, crossing Del Monte Lane at a marked crosswalk along the way. The connector is about two miles, mostly flat, surfaced in aggregate gravel rather than raw dirt, and rated accessible enough for wheelchairs and strollers depending on the equipment. Bikes and horses are allowed on nearly every trail in both parks except two: the Flume Trail and the Quail Run Trail. Dogs are welcome on leash the entire way.
Once you're inside Bartley Ranch proper, the character shifts. You cross a covered bridge, pass the Historic Huffaker School, and continue past the Western Heritage Interpretive Center, a working horse arena, and the Flying B picnic pavilion before the trail tucks beneath a rise called Windy Hill, where the Robert Z. Hawkins Amphitheater sits. It's a working transition from open range to something closer to a preserved 19th-century farmstead, and it happens on foot, on a single continuous walk that most residents drive to in two separate trips.
The Dairy Farm Under the Park
The buildings at Bartley Ranch aren't decoration. Before Washoe County owned any of it, the property was a working dairy operation run by a rancher named Buscalia, who irrigated his grazing land using two waterways: the Last Chance Ditch and the Lake Ditch. After World War II, Buscalia's son Gus Bartley converted the dairy into a horse boarding and training farm, which is where the Bartley name comes from. That operation ran until 1985, when the land was sold to the county. It took another decade of development before the park opened to the public in 1995.
The Last Chance Ditch is easy to miss in that story, but it's the one detail that doesn't stay in the past. It's still an active irrigation ditch, and it still runs through this stretch of South Reno exactly the way it did when it was watering Buscalia's dairy herd.
The Same Ditch Waters Your Neighbor's Pasture
Here's where the two halves of this area connect. Properties along Holcomb Ranch Lane routinely list water rights tied to the same Last Chance Ditch that once irrigated the land under Bartley Ranch Regional Park. A 2.5-acre parcel that came on the market this year on Holcomb Ranch Lane was marketed specifically around a tranquil stream courtesy of the Last Chance Ditch running through the lot. A separate estate nearby lists ten acre-feet of water rights on the same ditch, feeding alfalfa fields and a working orchard.
That's not a coincidence of naming. It's the same physical waterway, threading from the ranchland that's now a public park through private acreage half a mile away, doing today what it did for a working dairy eighty years ago. If you own or walk past a property on Holcomb Ranch Lane with water rights attached to it, there's a real chance the water tracing through that parcel is part of the same system that kept Buscalia's cattle fed before any of the current houses existed. The county park and the private ranchette next to it aren't just neighbors. They're plumbed together.
What the Trail Actually Feels Like Depending on the Month
None of this is a groomed suburban path, and the two parks make no attempt to pretend otherwise. The connector trail and the loops inside both parks are packed dirt or gravel, not pavement, and heavy rain or snow can wash sections out or leave them muddy enough to change your route. Spring and summer bring tick season, worth a check on your dog and yourself after a longer walk through the pasture sections. Photographers and early risers tend to favor summer mornings, when the light on Windy Hill and the surrounding pasture is at its best before the heat sets in.
The horse arena at Bartley Ranch is still a working facility, not a museum piece, so watch your footing on the paved paths near it. Wildlife sightings are common enough that longtime visitors mention yellow-bellied marmots along the overlook trail as a matter of course, not a rare event.
What's Actually on the Amphitheater Calendar Right Now
The Robert Z. Hawkins Amphitheater seats 403 people permanently, with grass seating for another 500 to 600 and a hard cap of 1,000. It's tucked beneath Windy Hill at the far end of the park, reachable by the same walk that starts at the covered bridge.
Early September already saw two shows come and go, a Northern Nevada Night Skies date headlined by A Flock of Seagulls and the Band Wars Music Festival the following afternoon. What's still ahead this season: a Pink Floyd tribute show called The Floyd on September 19, and another Night Skies date on October 10 featuring the Enemies of Freedom tour with Kennedy. Both fall under the venue's standard rules for larger shows: no coolers, no outside food or drink, clear bags only.
If you're weighing whether to go, check the Washoe County events page directly before you plan around it, since acts and dates on the fall calendar shift as shows get added.
The Second Loop Most Residents Haven't Tried
A few minutes south on Lakeside Drive, past the turn for Bartley Ranch, sits a different kind of trail entirely. The Ballardini Ranch Trailhead off Lone Tree Lane leads to a 2.3-mile loop with about 226 feet of climbing through sagebrush and scattered Jeffrey pine, with wide views back across the Truckee Meadows. It's rockier and more exposed than anything at Anderson or Bartley, with no shade cover, which makes it a trail for cooler mornings or fall afternoons rather than the middle of a summer day. Trail runners and mountain bikers use it heavily on weekends and after work, and more than one hiker has reported a rattlesnake warning rattle along the path, a reasonable reminder to stay alert on the rockier stretches.
It's a fundamentally different experience from the flat pastoral walk at Anderson and Bartley, and worth treating as a separate outing rather than an extension of the same afternoon.
The Point of Knowing All of This
None of this changes anyone's address. What it does is connect two things residents usually treat as unrelated: a county park system built on the bones of a 20th-century dairy and horse operation, and a private stretch of ranch acreage a few hundred yards away still drawing water from the same ditch that ran through that operation. The land here has one history, not two. Whether you're walking the loop, buying tickets to a Friday show at Hawkins, or just aware that the stream on the far side of your fence has a name and a past, it's worth knowing the two sides of Holcomb Ranch Road were never as separate as the drive between them suggests.
If you're curious how a specific parcel's water rights or acreage history connects to this system, or you just want to talk through what's changed in the neighborhood lately, Lynne King knows this stretch of South Reno well enough to walk you through it. Let's Connect.
