Would you like to be able to hike across Texas?

Hiking the Appalachian Trail is a bucket-list goal for many adventurers. Whether you travel the full 2,000+ miles or only a fraction, the trail offers a challenging and scenic tour of the southern and eastern U.S.

Now, some folks have dreams of creating a trail to rival the original, right here in Texas: the xTx, or Cross Texas Trail.

Charlie Gandy, the man behind the project, says he’s gathering support from landowners and hiking enthusiasts from across the state. Listen to the interview above or read the transcript below.

This transcript has been edited lightly for clarity:

Texas Standard: Why does Texas need its own long-distance hiking trail?

Charlie Gandy: Well, ask anybody who has hiked one of the crown jewels of our country’s trails: the Appalachian Trail, the Pacific Crest Trail, the Continental Divide Trail. Young people know about this; ask a young person about a long-distance trail, and they’ll tell you in many cases, those that have been on them, that they’re life-changing.

And as a native Texan, I know that the route that we have envisioned from Orange to El Paso, going up through the Piney Woods and through La Grange and the springs in San Marcos, out to the Hill Country north of Bandera, south of Fredericksburg, and then down to Leakey and then over to Sanderson and down into Big Bend National Park and then up into Big Bend State Park at the ranch, then up from there to the Soho of West Texas, Marfa, and then on up from there to one of the highest and greatest points in the state, the Davis Mountains. And then from there down to Balmorhea Springs, then back up to the highest peak in the state, Guadalupe. And then you only got another 150 miles to El Paso.

What was on your mind when you were creating this? Was it trying to get as many of those crown jewels as you could? 

Well, as a guy who’s hiked up most of those trails that I outlined earlier, I have tasted and learned from all of those. I have learned how to do this. I’ve got a lot of smart people that are on the team. And so this is going to be unusual. Ninety-six percent of the land in Texas is privately owned. And we’ll be using public right-of-ways where we have them.

I get to go out across this route because I think the number now is either eight or nine property owners along the route that would like for us to use their land as our route. And that’s a start.

We’ve been in operation for two months now and we have an inventory of helpers: Property owners want us to use their livestock well in the back of their ranch as a watering hole. It’s exciting what we’ve got going here.

Well, what’s in it for them? I mean, you hear sometimes about these plans for a big project, like a highway or a railroad, and some of the big struggle is getting landowners on board. What’s different about this?

We have a spectrum out there of the people who I just described that have either hiked the trails or know this culture and know the value of it from their perspective, either as a person who wants to share that with others – or, in some cases, they want to make money on it.

And so we have a spectrum of people out there that are everything from “we’ll host this for nothing” to “show me the business proposition here.” And we have a business proposition for those ranchers out there. And it looks very much like their hunting proposition. And yet it comes after the hunting season.

And so I get to have some really interesting conversations with ranchers that are land-rich and are looking for new sources of funds to take advantage of those wells way out back in those canyons that 20 or 30 years ago worked for the herd of cattle [that] aren’t out there anymore.

And you’re planning around wells. You want this to be a thing that’s sustainable for hikers and bikers, with water along the way. Is that right? 

Well, it’s necessary. It’s critical. Go west of the Devils River and people would die if they didn’t have adequate water sources.

So the vision of our five-year plan that costs $5 million is to put a water stop every 15 miles along the route, a water hole. And in some cases, those will be simple places, very much like the Appalachian Trail, where there’s a simple shelter, there’s a latrine and there’s a water source back over here.

In this case, we’ll also be taking advantage of technology. We’ll also have StarLink connections and security cameras so that we have communication to the outside world.

What we’re also able to do with that is tell stories along this route. Every 15 miles we’ll have web access, which means we’ll be audio storytelling along the way about the history of this route. That’s the route we want to hike.

You mentioned $5 million. Is this a completely private project or are you hoping to get some support from a Texas state agency?

This is a private enterprise. We’ll probably have government money coming along here and there. But we have people all over Texas – native Texans – that have the same zeal for this legacy project that I have because they’ve hiked those trails, too.

They know the value to the people hiking them. They know the values to the communities that the trails go through economically, as well as just bringing interesting people into their place. And they know that there’s hidden secrets in this private property all along this route that people from outside the state are looking to come explore and they’re looking to be a part of it in some way.

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What’s your timeline? How quickly do you hope to get this going? 

What we intend to do in the spring is have the sweaty taste of the xTx, which is north of Houston, probably 60 to 90 miles, a test portion of that where we have the water holes in place. We put up the bunkhouse that we want to put in about every 50 miles, and then we put up the crossroads, the place where people can connect with this route about every hundred miles.

And so with the infrastructure in place on a short piece during the month of March, we’ll be able to demonstrate how this kind of long-distance trail can work. The next week we’ll be out in the Hill Country doing the same thing, and then the next week in West Texas doing the same thing.

A lot of people are not familiar with this kind of adventure route. This is rough. It’s rustic, it’s rural, and therefore it’s romantic.

You are so optimistic. And I can see why you’re a salesman on this. What are your challenges? Obviously, it’s raising the money, it’s getting the landowners on board. Long-term, is there going to be an issue with who maintains and keeps this up? 

Great question. We’re starting with where we’re invited. The obstacles is that we have found gates on backroads that we didn’t expect to find. So we have to reroute that and rethink that route. At the same time, we found utility corridors that we didn’t recognize before.

I’ve got a buddy that is hot to trot to be the first hiker lodge at mile 100 at Lake Livingston. And so it’s like a puzzle. We get to piece together what we’ve got and then build on it on an annual basis.

Once the anxious property owners see that this is a responsible group of people that are using this route and the issues that they feared go away, then all of a sudden that’s how these trails get built.

So, Charlie, I’m sure there are people listening now that say ‘I’m not a landowner, I can’t help you that way, but how can I get involved?’ You got a website?

The website is the portal to this whole conversation. And it’s simply xtexas.org. That’s where people sign up to get on the free newsletter. If they want to make a contribution, they can do that there.

We’re organizing time, talent and treasure, and we invite you to look at this project as something that you can put your heart into. I have.

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