16-05-2025
The 1,550-Mile XTX Trail Is Texas's Version of the Pacific Crest
Pam LeBlanc
Journalist Pam LeBlanc spent 21 years covering fitness and adventure at the Austin American-Statesman. Today she's on the loose as a freelance writer, covering adventure and travel around the globe. When she's not writing, you'll find her backpacking, paddling, skiing, swimming or scuba diving. In addition to Condé Nast Traveler, her work has appeared in Texas Monthly, The Nature Conservancy Magazine, Gear Junkie, AARP Magazine, Southern Living, and Texas Parks and Wildlife Magazine.
Mud slurps at my shoes as I slog along the banks of the Rio Grande, deep in the heart of Santa Elena Canyon at Big Bend National Park. In front of me, Charlie Gandy, founder of the Cross Texas Trail, plunges into a dense thicket of reeds. Soon, we are scrambling over gravel bars and sloshing through knee-deep pools of water. Around us, sheer rock walls close in like curtains on a stage.
We're scouting an attempt-it-only-during-drought-conditions alternative route of the 1,550-mile Cross Texas Trail, or XTX, which cuts across the belly of the Lone Star State. None of the XTX trail is 'new'—it simply connects existing roads and trails—but Gandy is promoting it as the 'future Pacific Crest Trail of Texas', with big plans for additional infrastructure. Here in far West Texas, prolonged drought coupled with upstream water usage has slowed the Rio Grande's flow to little more than a trickle, opening the canyon to foot traffic. It's a good alternate section that hardy hikers can tackle in dry years; it's also giving me a chance to see how much potential Gandy sees in the XTX, and the land around it.
An alternate route to the XTX, attemptable only by hikers, takes you through the Santa Elena Canyon.
A 1,550-mile trail across Texas
The XTX, announced late last summer, is currently a red line on a map—a route that cobbles together seldom-used paved backroads, gravel drives, and existing dirt trails. It passes through state and national parks and private ranches. Anyone can head out now on foot, bicycle, or horse to tackle it. But once the route becomes more formalized, Gandy says, it will be even easier to make the trip—especially in a state that's 96 percent privately owned.
By next winter, organizers plan to have watering holes installed every 15 miles along the route. Eventually, they'll add simple overnight shelters, solar panels that will allow users to charge devices, latrines, internet access, and educational markers about Native Americans' connection to the land. They're also working with communities and landowners to open pay-to-stay overnight 'glamping' accommodations every 100 miles or so.
Gandy, a 66-year-old retired community design consultant who served as a Texas state representative in the 1980s, dreamed up the XTX while hiking the Tahoe Rim Trail in California last summer. The East Coast has the Appalachian Trail, and the West Coast has the Pacific Crest Trail, he figured, so Texas needs its own brag-worthy, long-distance trail, right? Gandy teamed with the nonprofit organization BikeTexas, which provides educational programming and promotes cycling, to plot a route and promote it. Together they've raised $60,000 for the project, and already begun putting that money to use on its development.
