A lost world sits at the bottom of Roy Creek Canyon. Nestled in the Texas Hill Country, beneath chasm walls 200 feet high, grows a secret forest of tall timber, live oak and sycamore and century-old cypress, clustered around a spring-fed creek and rushing clear green waterfalls.
The walls are high enough to keep the valley at a half-remove from the flow of solar time, the mornings coming late, the evenings early, shadows creeping out from their base to cloak the forest. High enough that, in 1941, the canyon’s owner John Hunnicutt complained to a young Red Adams that the place was a money pit, a hole to swallow unwary livestock, and he’d just as soon be rid of it.
Red and his best friend Herschel Black decided they liked the place enough to buy it. “Everybody thought they were crazy,” said Lew Adams, Red’s son and the property’s current owner. “You can’t raise crops in it; you can’t raise cattle and sheep.” Crazier still was the handshake agreement Red and Black struck: to leave the canyon more or less as they found it. No cut trees. No septic system. “They basically kept it in as natural a state as possible.”
