Sign up for TPR Today, Texas Public Radio's newsletter that brings our top stories to your inbox each morning.
You may have heard of the Great Springs Project—the effort to create a trail between San Antonio and Austin. Now a man has proposed a trail that will "Texas-size" that one—and in a big way.
We spoke to the 67-year-old Charlie Gandy not too long after he’d finished hiking Guadalupe Peak. If his name sounds familiar, that's because he's spent some time in the public eye.
“A long time ago I served in the Texas House of Representatives, when I was 23 years old, representing a district from East Dallas, a fifth- generation Texan,” Gandy said.
In the many years since, he’s now retired, and due to the intensity of Texas summers, splits his time between Texas and Seattle.
“I had rheumatic fever when I was 12 years old. I didn't expect to live past 30. And so that's why I was in a hurry pre-30 to make things happen,” he said.
As to the rest of his career, he spent much of it extoling the virtues of physical activity.
“In the past, I have consulted with cities and states on active living, bicycling and walking and running and developing facilities to accommodate all that safely,” Gandy said.
And so that project to create a grand trail: It’s called xTx and it would run east to west across the entire state. It clocks in at 1,550 miles long but given that Texas is only about 800 miles across, apparently, no straight lines are involved. When we pointed that out, Gandy laughed.
“It was the opposite of what a TXDOT engineer would do!” he said.
And while the route he has plotted isn’t straight, it does run through Texas’s most interesting parts.
“I tracked a route from the Quicksand Creek on the Sabine River at the Louisiana border, through some of the prettiest pine country north of Houston, and then through the horse country, around Navasota.”
If you follow this along on a map, it looks like someone plotted it wearing a blindfold.
He continued saying the path then moves "... out to Luckenbach, and then down to Comfort, and Center Point and Kerrville."
In West Texas it really gets haywire once you get to Big Bend, with the route then turning due north to take in Guadalupe National Park, then turning 90 degrees due west.
“Yeah, I can't imagine that you could find a route that would be any slower or harder than this,” Gandy said.
But of course, turning an 800-mile journey into a 1550-mile one has little to do with efficiency. It’s about making the journey itself an interesting one.
If creating a project this size sounds overwhelming, or if it seems that it’s being conceived in a random fashion, he said it’s just the opposite. He’s not just pulling these details out of thin air. He’s studied the grandaddy of American trails.
“This trail is starting out the exact same way that the Appalachian Trail did 125 years ago, with Benton McKaye doing it,” he said. “And that is, they mapped out a route that was mostly public roads and public land, and then they started seeing where they could improve that and then going and talking to property owners about taking it across their ranches. Sometimes they bought right of way, sometimes they bought an easement.”
Anyone familiar with ranching know that it’s harder and harder for ranchers to make ends meet, so many have been finding ways to create small income streams. Their efforts run from opening Air bnbs to deer and oil leases to other endeavors, such as this one.
“I've got Pene Ferguson, who is a fifth-generation rancher out there, and is working hard to hold on to her ranch. She's got a guest house there that she wants to rent out to hikers and accommodate them on horses or mountain bikes,” he said.
And so ranchers who might not have been on a bike since they were kids suddenly feel a kinship to the concept of a biking/walking/horseback trail running through their ranch. Another consideration: water.
“We'll be setting up about every 15 miles campsites with watering hole, because let's be clear, this is a seasonal route,” Gandy said. “It's too hot to do this route in the summertime, but it's an excellent route to do in the fall, winter and spring.”
The xTx project is also looking to employ the help of those whose interests run parallel.
“We've got explorer scouts that are interested in doing these water hole projects as a scout project,” he said.
He looks forward to sidebar projects like plotting the best places and dates to catch bluebonnets along the trail, or perhaps bigtooth maples where they grow.
The project has just begun and faces staggering odds. That said, reception to it has been surprising.
“When we put the word out about this project in September, the phone started ringing and the emails started coming in, and the money started coming in,” Gandy said. “And within a month, I had about a dozen property owners along the route that said, 'hey, that black line looks like it's coming through my ranch. Come talk to me.'”
He said the land and its owners have stories that have never been heard.
“There are stories that haven't been told yet, and that's what we're looking to accumulate,” he said.
Those who built the Pacific Crest Trail or the Appalachian Trail were told their idea was nuts, too, so he doesn’t mind any skepticism.
“You know what? I am Texas proud, and I am looking for people who are proud and generous!”
