Guadalupe Highlands

The upper Guadalupe, before it becomes a tubing river. Cypress, clear water, and the largest town in the Hill Country sitting on top of it.

Six towns strung along thirty miles of the Guadalupe and the roads above it. The river is clear and cypress-lined here, shallow enough to walk across in places, and it runs past every one of them.

The country empties out fast heading west. Kerrville has the hospital and the grocery stores and sits central enough to reach most of the Hill Country in an hour; Hunt, Ingram and Mountain Home are small on purpose. Camp Verde is barely a store and a historical marker — though the marker is about camels, which is not a sentence you write about most of Texas.