Perfect Timing 
The Ultimate Hill Country Tour
From Devil’s Backbone to Utopia—and, yes, Fredericksburg—here’s a guide to the towns, scenic views, back roads, and all the stops along the way.
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High Street, Comfort’s main thoroughfare, appears to have been frozen in time. The businesses housed in solid limestone fortresses and old clapboard homes appeared to cater as much to locals as to out-of-towners, typified by the Ingenhuett general store and the Comfort Common shops in the old Ingenhuett-Faust Hotel. I admired the pine antiques at Southwestern Elegance, rare books at the Old Fire Station Antique Mall, and European crystal at Fritzi’s. The prices were generally lower than at comparable stores in Fredericksburg or Kerrville. I was particularly taken with Faltin and Company, one block off High on Main, housed inside an Alfred Giles building that was as fine a work as the hand-painted china, petit point, filigree, and antique desks sold inside.
True to the town’s freethinking origins, the Comfort Art Gallery is actually an artists guild, or cooperative. Rather than merely showing films, the Seventh Street Theatre has converted to staging live dramas with local actors. VelAnne said that if I wanted to know anything about anyone in town, I should see Gael Montana, the proprietor of the Comfort Barber Shop. But Gael had already hung out the closed sign for the day, although she thoughtfully left the checkerboard on the shop’s porch in case anyone got a hankering to play.
By this time it was getting dark. After a mess of ribs at Buzzie’s Bar-B-Q, VelAnne and Maggie headed back to Luckenbach and I drove on to Kerrville. The Hill Country’s biggest town (population: 19,134, nearly three times the size of Fredericksburg), Kerrville spans the Guadalupe River. It was the region’s first resort and retirement community, a place where sufferers of tuberculosis, like country singer Jimmie Rodgers, came to recuperate in the twenties. But the completion of Interstate 10 touched off a growth spurt that has obliterated most of Kerrville’s small-town ambience.
Still, the older part of downtown rated a stroll. My attention was drawn to a wooden duck decoy and an ancient red scooter at the Water Street Antique Company and Tea Room (“The Hill Country’s Largest”), and to Spanish pueblo doors at nearby Artesian Accents, but it’s hard to say whether the items or their prices (a steep $165 for the scooter; a bargain $412 for the doors) were more noteworthy. The 127-year-old Schreiner’s department store, next door to the original Schreiner mansion, was more to my liking. Lunch in the new Hill Country was Cajun-style pork roast, mashed potatoes, and fresh—not canned—green beans accompanied by a glass of Burgundy at Joe’s Jefferson Street Cafe, housed in a two-story restored Victorian mansion (at least there’s chicken-fried steak on the menu), polished off by a fizzy Coca-Cola at Pampell’s Antiques and Soda Fountain. Another local attraction is the Cowboy Artists of America Museum, but since my appreciation of Western art is limited to the cartoons of Kerrville native son Ace Reid, I decided to roll on down the road.
Kerrville to Concan
THE BUSY HIGHWAY WEST OF KERRVILLE starts out through one of the least appealing commercial strips found in the Hill Country, but the scenery soon improves. At Ingram, I took a brief detour on the Old Ingram Loop, to a collection of rock buildings that has been gentrified into something of an arts and crafts colony, and returned to the main road for some of the prettiest riverfront and most expensive real estate in the Hill Country. Lining the cypress-shaded banks of the Guadalupe were lavish private homes constructed of limestone that define the local version of gracious living. Intermingled with the homes were the occasional resort, upscale and downscale, and summer camps, whose cabins were visible from the highway. In Hunt, where the two branches of the Guadalupe come together at a great wading spot, I detoured two miles up the North Fork road to view the replicas of Stonehenge and Easter Island statuary that a rancher has placed in a pasture. More weird architecture awaited me back in Hunt, where the unusual wood, cement, and limestone facade of the Hunt Country Store owes its inspiration to the cedar-chopper-meets-Gaudi school.
Beyond Camp Mystic, the South Fork road became curvier as it crossed and recrossed the Guadalupe numerous times, and the landscape turned rockier and drier. Then the river was gone, the oaks gave way to juniper, and the Hill Country faded into the desiccated ranchland of the Edwards Plateau. I turned south toward Vanderpool, through more of same, until the road suddenly dropped off the plateau into Sabinal River Canyon, the site of Lost Maples State Natural Area. This is one of the few places in Texas where you can see fall colors—if you can get through the traffic jams on November weekends. On this spring afternoon, though, the park was almost deserted. I had my choice of two four-mile hiking trails and took the one along the river. But irritating signs prohibiting any contact with the water led me to cut the hike short and get on to one of the best drives in Texas—RR 337 to Leakey (that’s “Lake-ee,” as in water, not “Leek-ee,” as in faucet). It climbs back to the canyon’s rim and begins a rollercoaster ride through the highest, steepest, and most rugged part of the Hill Country. For the next eighteen miles the highway switchbacks up and down a series of ridge lines, skittering along the edges of sheer cliffs and dropping down into wrinkled, creek-carved valleys.
I stopped in Leakey, where most of Frio Canyon’s businesses are located, and grabbed a real milk shake made with Blue Bell ice cream at the Leakey Drug Store. The little town borders the Frio River, which, next to the Guadalupe, is the Hill Country’s most popular waterway, particularly the seventeen miles between Leakey and Concan. Along its banks are vacation homes (less chic than those on the Guadalupe), stables, cabins, campgrounds—and ever-popular Garner State Park. On warm weather weekends, the Saturday night dance at the park’s pavilion is the social event of the entire western Hill Country. I settled in for the night at Neal’s Lodges in Concan. The appeal of its screened cabins is a location on a bluff above one of the best swimming holes on the Frio. I jumped in immediately, and I am pleased to report that its water is clean and clear, at least until the summer invasion of the Hill Country.
Concan to Blanco
THE HOMEWARD LEG OF MY HILL Country tour took me first to Utopia, a sleepy hamlet on the Sabinal River where the social idealism of the town’s name is reflected by the community gardens (organic, of course) and a bottled water plant. At Vanderpool, I picked up RR 337 again, but the vertigo-inducing views of the previous day’s wild drive on the western segment of the road were replaced by pastoral scenes and fields of wildflowers. The rural setting, the easy curves, the cloudless sky, and the aroma of spring made driving in the Hill Country pure pleasure. It really doesn’t get any better than this.
My reverie was broken by Medina, a once-declining town that has been reborn as the Apple Capital of Texas. Although the Texas International Apple Festival won’t be held until the peak of harvest season, on the last weekend in July, I still got my fill of this increasingly popular Hill Country specialty crop at Love Creek Orchards. This combination bakery, cider mill, and country store is the repository of all things apple: strudel, jelly, mulled cider, chutney, ice cream, earrings, peelers, live saplings, even apple-strudel coffee beans. It was enough to make me forget peaches—until summer.
Near Bandera the road climbed up Bandera Pass. It doesn’t look like much, but this modest piece of high ground has twice played a role in Texas history. Spanish troops battled a band of Apaches here in 1732 and established the pass as a line of demarcation separating the two civilizations. One hundred ten years later, a small group of Texas Rangers reestablished the line by fighting off a Comanche war party twice its size at the same spot. Later the pass was guarded by soldiers from Camp Verde; its former location, now on private land, is noted by a historical marker. A U.S. cavalry outpost established in 1856, Camp Verde was the site of an Army experiment, promoted by Secretary of War Jefferson Davis, to use camels as pack animals on the frontier. The Civil War brought the experiment to an end, and occupying Confederate troops let many of the camels run off. Four years after the war, Camp Verde was abandoned.
On the other hand, the Old Camp Verde General Store, established 139 years ago to accommodate troops on weekend leave from the camp, is thriving. One of the finest general stores in the entire Hill Country, the current building, built at the turn of the century, has a shaded porch, a large patio, and gardens next to a creekside park. The store sells all kinds of implements, tools, toys, books, maps, seeds, camel memorabilia, and sundry useful and useless items found only in general stores, such as pickled eggs and rat cheese. I loaded up on five kinds of jellybeans from the old-fashioned candy section.
I was smelling the barn now. I drove straight through Comfort, made a side trip to Waring just so I could say I was halfway between Welfare and Comfort, and crossed First Coffee Hollow Draw—and Second Coffee Hollow Draw. At Sisterdale, symbols of the new and old Hill Country are the two main attractions. I passed an idle hour sipping Cabernet Sauvignon at the Sister Creek Vineyards, feeling as if I were in a European painting—vineyards, a rock farmhouse, spreading oaks, a perfectly manicured lawn. Call me provincial if you want to, but I can’t imagine that the South of France could be more pleasant. Plus, I don’t think there’s anywhere in the South of France like the Sisterdale General Store and bar down the street. I pulled up a stool at the one-hundred-year-old bar and ordered up a cool one from Valerija Woolvin, the radiant white-haired bartender with a decided accent. In a matter of minutes, I learned that Woolvin doesn’t merely tend bar but also serves as hostess and referee for the games of dominoes, moon, and 42 that are played Tuesday afternoon and Thursday night. She’s also the town historian, who likes to recount all the rich and famous folks who’ve stopped at her store over the years (“That Dan Rather, he was something else,” she chuckled cryptically). She guided me from the bar to the store, where she showed off a life-size cutout of George Strait holding a can of Bud Light, with Strait’s autograph across his shoulder.
I reluctantly took my leave of Valerija Woolvin and got back on the road. Twenty miles of curves and hills later, I arrived at the junction with U.S. 281, the primary north-south highway through the Hill Country. San Antonio was a straight shot south. Blanco was seven miles north, and beyond it the turnoff to Austin. Home was fifteen minutes away, a pleasant ramble along the unsullied Little Blanco River valley to a nice little spot near Devil’s Backbone. You see, I discovered that I liked the Hill Country so much, I moved there.
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