Dancing the Polka

Last year, shortly after my daughter was born, I started putting £25 a month into a savings account dedicated to building up the funds necessary for her and me to one day hike the Appalachian Trail (AT). This week, however, I learned about an initiative in my native state of Texas that could change our plans.

Along with the Pacific Crest Trail (2,653 miles from the US-Mexico border to US-Canada border) and the Continental Divide Trail (3,028 miles from the US-Mexico border to US-Canada border, but running through different states than the PCT), the AT (2,194 miles from Georgia to Maine) is part of the so-called Triple Crown of Hiking.

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At roughly 1,500 miles, the newly proposed Cross Texas Trail isn’t as long as those iconic routes but it’s impressive enough. And it’s already got its own Triple Crown-style branding: proponents are calling it the xTx (pronounced “Ex-Tex”).

It’s difficult to know what verb tense to use when talking about the xTx ─ present, future, or conditional. There aren’t any precise maps of the route yet, nor reports of anyone having actually traveled from one end to the other. At the moment, the xTx appears to exist largely in the mind of one man: Charlie Gandy.

Gandy was a Texas state lawmaker in the 1980s, representing the outer Dallas suburb of Mesquite. These days he’s an avid bicyclist living several thousand miles away, in Poulsbo, Washington. I’d assume that the idea of the xTx came about in part because, like all Texas expats (or, should we say “Texpats?”), Gandy spends a lot of time daydreaming about exploring his native land. Certainly it’s something I do.

“I’m a native Texan,” he told Texas Monthly recently. “I really love the state. I’m attempting to piece together… the most scenic route… the coolest route, the most target-rich, true-to-Texas route.”

Gandy says his inspiration for the xTx came from the PCT and a trip along the 170-mile Tahoe Rim Trail, which runs through California and Nevada.

“We’re at the infancy stage of a big, hairy goal,” Gandy told Texas Monthly, explaining that although he has a solid sense of what the Cross Texas Trail route will/could look like and where it will/could go, there are still thorny issues that need to be ironed out.

Despite that, he is hoping that he’ll be able to deliver print and digital maps of the route by spring 2025. The route would run from Orange, on the Texas-Louisiana border, to El Paso, on the Texas-New Mexico border. Or vice versa.

“From bayous in the east, through pine forests and hill country, grand rivers, pristine national parks, and finally the drama of the desert, this is a meandering life-affirming adventure through the heart of Texas,” explains the xTx website.

An image on the Cross Texas Trail website shows a line running across the fat middle of Texas, kind of but not really parallel to Interstate 10, with a dip into Big Bend National Park. (I can’t help noticing that this route goes nowhere near Gandy’s old constituency of Mesquite.) According to the website, the xTx “is currently mapped out on quiet country backroads, gravel track, and some jeep trails.” 

Roughly 40 percent of the route would be gravel road, which sounds kind of boring to me. But certainly it would support Gandy’s desire to ensure the xTx is open to bicyclists and horse riders in addition to hikers. But with that desire you start to see some of the flaws ─ or, at least, challenges ─ to this plan. Can it really be all things to all users? The question that stands out to me is: where will people camp?

Part of what makes the Triple Crown routes so incredibly popular is the fact you can pitch a tent pretty much anywhere along the way. On the Appalachian Trail, for example, there are free campsites every 8 miles or so (on average). You need that kind of set-up for thru-hikers. The Triple Crown routes each take about 6 months to complete. Without free places to bed down each night, doing a continuous hike would be financially untenable for the overwhelming majority of the people who take on these life-changing and life-enriching challenges each year.

I’d assume that hiking the whole of the xTx would take 3-4 months, give or take. Again, not a space of time in which most people can afford to be paying for a hotel room every night. But Texas, annoyingly, is a state where more than 96 percent of the land is privately owned. That means you’re going to need a whole lot of cooperation, or money, or both, to ensure that thru-hiking is viable.

Especially because Texas is a Stand-Your-Ground state. Without getting into the intricacies of the law, that effectively means that it’s legally much easier for a person to shoot someone who is on their property. So, wild camping is pretty much out. You’re not going to be able to get a good night’s sleep when there’s a very real risk of becoming intimately familiar with a land owner’s gun collection.

Water would be a challenge, too. Not so much in the eastern portions of the route, but once you get beyond Hill Country things get very dry. I’ve told before the story of visiting Paint Rock, Texas, where my great-great-grandfather eventually settled after arriving from Ireland. Feeling the dry, pine-needle-like grass crunch beneath my shoe, I found it difficult to even imagine Ireland ─ to think that a place so wet could exist on the same planet as a place so dry.

Paint Rock is a few hundred miles north of where the xTx would run and privy to far more condensation than the Chihuahuan Desert that covers much of the western section. Also, based on the towns that Gandy references, it sounds like he pictures a big section of the route hugging the border. So, you might find yourself dealing with a lot of coyotes ─ both the four-legged kind and the people/drug-trafficking kind.

Lastly, I wonder about what time of year you’d want to attempt this hike. Obviously not summer. There is nowhere in Texas that you’d want to be doing long-distance hiking in June, July, or August. I’d guess that February to May is probably your best bet, running in either direction.

The whole thing’s still a long way from reality, but I admire Gandy for having a big idea. And I look forward to seeing the exact route when that becomes available next year. All in all, I’m inclined to stick to my own big, hairy goal of hiking the Appalachian Trail. But, who knows? I don’t envision hiking the AT with my daughter for another 20 years. A lot could happen on the xTx in that time.