Beckie Irvin crested the rocky hilltop in her truck. She threw it in park and joined Cobra Thomas and Beverly Garland, the property’s owners, at the edge of a ravine. Beneath them, the expanse of Texas Hill Country stretched out for miles. This view will one day belong not only to Garland and Thomas, but to countless travelers on the xTx trail (pronounced ex-Tex), a proposed 1,500-mile route stretching across Texas from the Louisiana border to El Paso.
Beckie Irvin, Garland, and Thomas walk the property in Medina, Texas exploring possible sites for future xTx infrastructure. (Photo by Ilana Newman/The Daily Yonder)
The current xTx trail, intended for hikers, cyclists, and equestrians, navigates entirely along existing public routes—shoulders of state highways, backcountry gravel roads, and established trails. It connects travelers to state and national parks and showcases Texas’s vast and varied landscapes, all while remaining on public land.
The xTx team is now planning the trail’s next phase, which includes routing around concerning areas and moving sections of the trail off public roads and onto private property through public access easements. By partnering with landowners like Garland and Thomas, Irvin, xTx’s acting executive director, is taking the first steps toward a safer and more sustainable trail that preserves public access and fulfills the long-term vision of xTx founder Charlie Gandy.
In the summer of 2024, Gandy was hiking through snowy trails in Lake Tahoe, wishing he was back in his home state of Texas.
“It was June and there was still snow up to my waist,” Gandy said. “It just occurred to me, why isn’t Texas the great through-hiking adventure for people in these seasons when the conditions on other trails can be prohibitive?”
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With that seed planted, Gandy—a former state legislator, avid outdoorsman, and founder of BikeTexas—began wondering what it would take to create a long-distance trail experience in Texas.
One challenge stood out immediately: access. More than 96% of the state’s land is privately owned, one of the highest rates in the country.
But Gandy had seen what most Texans hadn’t.
“I’d worked for the Texas Nature Conservancy and in other roles that allowed me to go behind the gates most people never see,” Gandy said. “I was able to experience the 96% of Texas land that’s privately owned and closed to the public. Seeing that landscape firsthand made me realize that, over time, we could create a trail system that takes advantage of the facilities that already exist.”
Now, he, his wife Melissa Balmer, xTx’s chief storytelling officer, and Irvin, are making that vision a reality.
Beckie Irvin reviews maps and her GPS software as she plans for a day of exploring alternative routing. (Photo by Ilana Newman / The Daily Yonder)
Finding the Trail
Gandy published the first draft of the xTx Trail route in August 2024. Since then, the work of refining the route has become a near-constant loop of scouting and revision. After four full passes by car, he’s now completing the route a fifth time—this round by bike—while the xTx team continually adjusts the map.
Each trip brings new puzzles: how to avoid high-traffic roads, how to reroute around unsafe terrain, and how to forge relationships with landowners, ranchers, and local governments who have mixed feelings about the project.
The revision process can also be slow, Irvin said, because maps rarely tell the whole story.
In November, Irvin set out with a map and a plan to reroute around a dangerous section of state highway near Leakey, Texas, that the xTx currently crosses. But when it comes to navigating on backcountry roads, things don’t always go according to plan.
“Sometimes you can see a road on the map, but then you start driving down it. You get 10 miles in, and you come out to a gate and you have to turn around and find an alternative route,” Irvin said.
As she criss-crossed the stretch of highway between Leakey and Barksdale, two small Hill Country towns, Irvin turned down every promising backroad, only to hit locked gates, dead ends, or private property lines. Each wrong turn meant backtracking and recalculating.
Irvin marked the property lines and blocked roads on her GPS and also noted other features that could affect travelers.
“We use my GPS software to mark things like hazards, points of interest, businesses or gas stations that might be off the beaten path, but that people could use to refuel,” she said.
Even after a full day of searching, Irvin was not able to find a viable alternative route and she now faces the possibility of rerouting a much larger section of the trail.
On top of perilous highways, the Hill Country stretch of the xTx also poses the particular challenge of water sources.
“Water sources aren’t an issue in East Texas, but once we get out here, we really need to carefully consider how the trail accesses water,” Irvin said.
Partnering with local communities and landowners is part of the solution, potentially opening up new opportunities to construct backcountry water caches and develop trail infrastructure.
Debbie Breen, Beckie Irvin, and Diana Walters examine a map of the xTx. (Photo by Ilana Newman / The Daily Yonder)
Community Collaboration and Gateway Towns
As the xTx team works to create access points across Texas’s ecological range, they often return to one of their core motivations of connecting people to the land itself.
“Second only to California, Texas is the most biodiverse state in the country. We have more than 800 habitats here. When you walk the xTx Trail, you’ll pass through the Piney Woods, the Cross Timbers, the prairies, the Edwards Plateau, and the Trans-Pecos Mountains—five of Texas’s major ecoregions,” Irvin said. “You’ll see how different the flora, fauna, and even the weather are in each one. I think what’s so powerful about spending time in nature is that when you connect with something, you feel more pride in it. You deepen your sense of belonging to the land and to a place.”
To bring that vision to life, xTx depends on strong local partnerships. One of the communities stepping forward is Bandera, a Hill Country town known as the “cowboy capital of the world.” With its ranching history and equestrian culture, Bandera has quickly emerged as a potential gateway to the trail.
Debbie Breen, who serves on the Bandera City Council, said local interest formed almost immediately.
“I think it’s an awesome thing. I found out about it about a year ago,” she said. “It fits so well into our community, so we wanted to be involved in every way we could.”
Bandera’s horse and cowboy culture took root after the Civil War, when the town became a main staging point for cattle drives up the The Great Western Trail, a major 19th-century route that moved millions of Texas longhorns north to railheads and markets across the Great Plains. The ranching heritage endured into the 20th century, cementing Bandera’s equestrian culture.
Among those hoping to weave Bandera’s heritage into the xTx trail is Diana Walters, a local business owner and co-founder of the Bandera Equine Posse, which works to connect the local horse community and improve trail access.
One of Bandera Equine Posse’s proposed projects involves turning an underused storage hut into a day-use livery, or public stable, that could support equestrians on the trail.
“I think that we would be the only city in the United States that actually has a livery. We haven’t encountered another one,” Walters said. “I see Bandera as a gateway to equestrian activity, so it could definitely be tied in. Just looking at the xTx map, I can see interesting ways to incorporate what’s already here [in Bandera] into xTx in the future, and there are a lot of willing people ready to help make it happen.”
A sign in downtown Bandera, Texas. (Photo by Ilana Newman / The Daily Yonder)
Community partnerships, like the one developing in Bandera, are crucial to the trail’s future. Irvin said her role is to design collaborations that strengthen the local foundations already in place.
“I do not want any community, any land owner, any public land entity, to feel like we are trying to take over or plow through what they’re doing. So much incredible work is already being done,” Irvin said. “My vision is to come alongside and amplify the work that’s already happening, such as a historic restaurant in Bandera. I can put it on our maps, share the details, and highlight its story.”
For residents like Walters and Breen, partnering with the xTx goes beyond recreation or tourism, it is also about the rural roots that define the region.
“If you identify yourself as a gateway to the longest accessible horse trail in the United States, to me, that is monumental for the town, and it also capitalizes on the history of this town as being the gathering point for the feeder for the Western Trail,” Walters said.
But when it comes to private land access, there may still be challenges ahead.
“People aren’t leasing their ranches as much as they used to,” Breen said. “They still do, especially the big game outfits, but the smaller places rarely lease anymore. It’s gotten hard to find a lease…It’s still around, just nothing like when I was a kid.”
And with the opening of whitetail deer hunting season in Hill Country, Irvin has a lot on her mind.
“Hunting is such a big economic driver,” Irvin said. “I don’t know what it looks like yet, but my mind is already thinking about the consideration and conversations we need to have about safety.”
And in Bandera, Walters said property rights and hunting culture are central.
“You know the rights that property owners have to do things on their property, they take them very seriously here,” Walters said. “But it is part of the heritage, and it’s a way of life.”
Partnering with Landowners
Beckie Irvin and Beverly Garland meet on Garland and Thomas’s property in Medina, Texas. (Photo by Ilana Newman / The Daily Yonder)
Other landowners have leapt at the opportunity to be a part of the xTx.
Once Gandy began laying the groundwork for the xTx Trail, he realized he wasn’t alone in imagining a long-distance route across Texas.
“When we went public on this a year ago, I had several people come out of the woodwork saying, ‘Hey, I’ve I’ve hiked these trails. I’ve had that idea, but never got around to doing anything.’ So now those people are helping us open gates and find friends along the route,” Gandy said.
In its current, earliest phase, the trail relies heavily on public land and existing roads. But Irvin and Gandy are already looking ahead to what the next version of the xTx could become.
“The vision was that, if we hit the ground running, we could create a trail that made use of existing facilities at first,” Gandy said. “Then, over time, we could transition the trail onto private ranches that offer unique features, facilities, and other standout elements.”
Building a trail across private lands requires navigating a complex network of interests. Ranchers, farmers, conservationists, outdoor users, and local governments all view land through different lenses, Irvin said, and the xTx team aims to build trust and connections across those communities.
“It is like a huge venn diagram with multiple circles, and I’m constantly stepping foot into those different circles,” Irvin said. “I take very seriously my responsibility to build rapport with these land owners and educate the public on issues related to their land and make sure that we protect them and are extremely respectful when we’re on them.”
For some, learning about the trail prompted life-changing decisions. When Cobra Thomas first heard about the xTx, he immediately thought of his wife, Beverly Garland, a fourth-generation Texan and lifelong horse lover.
“I sent her the article and said, ‘Do we want to look for property along this route they’re talking about?’ And she texts back YES—all caps, and I think there was an exclamation point in there too,” Thomas said. “That’s how we first learned about it, and then we started looking for properties along the trail here.”
They studied maps and GPS coordinates from the xTx website and began scouting potential properties. Garland and Thomas live in a converted school bus and have had dreams of purchasing a property for years. Within months of first learning about the trail, they purchased 35 acres in Medina, Texas, right along the proposed route. The property sits atop a hill, offering sweeping views of the surrounding Hill Country.
Garland and Thomas plan to use part of the property as a space for overnight equestrian visitors, offering facilities where both riders and their horses can rest and recover.
“We envision this being a place where people will want to stop, recuperate a bit, and enjoy the Texas Hill Country, the quiet, the solitude, and soak in more of what they came to the trail to get, which is to be away from their day-to-day life and its stresses, and whatever healing they’re here to do,” Garland said. “We just want to be part of that and help facilitate it for them.”
They recently walked Irvin across the new property, pointing out possible locations for future trail infrastructure, camping spots, and access.
“It’s a rare experience to walk across raw land that literally there’s not even a trail on. We just have a map with topographic lines. So that was really special,” Irvin said. “And to get to see, oh, this could be a spot where future travelers camp and refill their water and horses can graze was surreal.”
Irvin and Gandy are making these visits to properties across the state, from the edges of East Texas to the far reaches of West Texas, carving out a long-term plan to merge public and private.
As Garland and Thomas watch the sunset from the highest point on their property, a section they have named contemplation corner, they see the potential in the land and the people who may someday pass through it.
“It’s wonderful to think about people coming in and having a close-up view of Texas, learning not just about the beautiful landscape here, but about the people, and having that real, up-close experience with individuals they might have held stereotypes about, but who they’ll meet as real, flesh-and-blood people with ideas and sorrows and joys, just like them,” Garland said.
Irvin knows that building these relationships, and completing the broader vision for the trail, will take time. She is constantly weighing the questions, concerns, and resources that emerge in conversations between landowners and the xTx team.
“What does it look like for a landowner to say yes to allowing people to come onto their property, to allowing us to build a trail on their property?” Irvin said.
Garland might have the answer.
“It’d be really cool if someday people tell stories about the time they came to the trail and they stayed at our place; that we become a good part of their memories,” she said.
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