The Route Makers - Bonus Episode: Real Texas Romance

The series is complete: five makers, five routes, a line drawn around the country and through a city and straight through the hardest thing a person can face. But there was one more maker we couldn't leave out, because his trail is so new, and so unlike any of the others, that it needed its own dispatch.

Charlie "Freestyle" Gandy — fifth-generation Texan, former state legislator, and self-described artist — just finished walking the xTx: 1,500 miles across Texas, from the alligator-infested Sabine River on the Louisiana border to El Paso. He invented it two years ago on the Tahoe Rim Trail, postholing through snow, when it hit him that Texas needed a great winter trail. Then he borrowed a white van named Vanna White and drove it back and forth across the state three and a half times, finding the dead ends and the gates.

Building a trail across Texas means a problem no other maker in this series faced: almost none of the land is public. So Charlie negotiates — hundreds of private ranchers, one easement at a time — using what he calls the "Trojan horse strategy": lead with horses, because a rancher who'd never open a gate for a backpacker will open it for a horse. Along the way the trail is gathering a tribe — Triple Crowners in their sixties, military veterans building shelters for focus and healing, whole trail towns reinventing themselves.

And at the heart of it is the thing Charlie calls "real Texas romance" — the idea that a trail can pull strangers together across every kind of difference. He hikes with people whose politics are nothing like his, and the trail is the one thing they share. It's the whole series' theme, Texas-sized: a route as a reason for people to build something bigger than themselves.

The line isn't finished. That's the best part — and if you want to help draw it, Charlie will tell you exactly where to go.

Featured route: the xTx (X Texas Trail Project) — 1,500 miles, Louisiana border to El Paso Featured maker: Charlie "Freestyle" Gandy Learn more / get involved: extexas.org

Thanks for walking The Route Makers with us.

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