Clear-water canyon country, and Texas's own Hell's Gate.
Possum Kingdom Lake is a 19,800-acre Brazos River reservoir in the Palo Pinto Mountains, impounded by Morris Sheppard Dam in 1941 and known for water clear enough to draw scuba divers, and for Hell's Gate — the twin limestone cliffs that once hosted the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Championship.
Possum Kingdom Lake sits on the Brazos River eighteen miles southeast of Graham, impounded by Morris Sheppard Dam — a reinforced-concrete, Ambursen-type dam authorized by Congress in 1935 and completed in 1941, the first built by the Brazos River Conservation and Reclamation District. The lake takes its name from the early 1900s, when a Mineral Wells hide buyer nicknamed the canyon homesteads along this stretch of the Brazos the Possum Kingdom for their steady trade in opossum pelts. Two marinas near the lake's south end, The Cliffs Marina and Bluff Creek Marina, handle most of the boat traffic, and Hemmingway's, Boondocks PK Bar & Grill, and Chaparral Grille at The Cliffs Resort cover the dining around Graford. The lake's defining feature is Hell's Gate, twin 90-foot limestone cliffs framing a boat-only passage into a cove over 100 feet deep — famous enough to have hosted the Red Bull Cliff Diving World Championship, and the site of one of the state's larger July 4th fireworks shows. Possum Kingdom State Park, on the lake's north end, adds camping and hiking through the Palo Pinto Mountains. Graford's Trading Post covers the grocery run; Mineral Wells, about thirty minutes away, covers the hospital.
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