Hill Country: The Road to Utopia

It’s said that at when Robert Frost lived in San Antonio in the mid-1930s, the poet enjoyed trekking the Texas Hill Country because the terrain reminded him of a Western version of rural Vermont and New Hampshire in his native New England. As naturalist Richard C. Bartlett notes in his 1995 book Saving the Best Of Texas, the Hill Country—and the larger Edwards Plateau that contains it—“still looks much as it did millions of years ago.” The question of which backroads in this area to explore likely presented Robert Frost with dilemmas as intri-guing as those encountered in his famous poem. For wherever one may wander in the Hill Country, adventure, discovery, and earthly splendor lie in wait.

Selecting a sampler of unbeaten pathways to chronicle here proved just as challenging. I chose an area southwest of Kerrville that ranges across portions of Kerr, Real, Bandera, and Uvalde counties. It’s a land of expansive valleys and soaring canyon walls, where roads skirt clear, spring-fed rivers and snake along roller coaster-like routes with breathtaking views. Inviting hideaways, resorts, and lodges seem to hug the road ’round every bend. As reflected in the name of one of the towns here, the region strikes many as a veritable utopia.

See the full article in the September 2007 issue.

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