The Best Day Trips from Austin

Start with the big one: a pink granite dome rising 425 feet above the surrounding country, roughly 640 acres of bare rock underfoot at 1,825 feet above sea level. The Tonkawa heard it creak and groan at night; geologists blame the stone contracting after a day of sun. Take the Summit Trail up, and reserve a pass online first — from September through May the park fills.

House Resolution 1024, adopted by the Texas Legislature in 1999, proclaimed this the Barbecue Capital of Texas, and four major barbecue joints back up the paperwork. Black's has fed people under the same family since 1932; Smitty's opened in 1999 on the site where Kreuz Market had been smoking since 1900. Order brisket at Black's and plan the nap for the passenger seat.

Fifty feet of waterfall pours off a limestone shelf into a jade-green pool held in a collapsed grotto, 23 miles west of Austin off Highway 71. Travis County requires reservations every day of the week, and a booked slot is still no promise of swimming — staff close the water when bacteria counts spike. Go anyway; the box-canyon walk carries a no-swim morning on its own.

Henry D. Gruene put up his dance hall in 1878, and the 6,000-square-foot room still books music most nights — it bills itself as the oldest continually operating dance hall in Texas. The German-Texan town around it, absorbed into New Braunfels, kept its short row of old buildings and its unhurried afternoons. Time the day so it ends with a band inside Gruene Hall.

Yes, it fits in a day — the trick is choosing. The five Spanish missions, the Alamo among them, became the only UNESCO World Heritage site in Texas in 2015, and the four south of downtown are far quieter than the one everybody photographs. Take the missions in the morning, lunch on the River Walk, the city's second-most-visited attraction, and beat the evening traffic north.

Two swimming holes make the argument. Blue Hole sits along Cypress Creek near the village, and Jacob's Well — the karst spring at the creek's headwaters northwest of town — drops about 30 feet straight down before angling into underwater passages divers have mapped past 4,000 feet. Hays County manages the land around the well now. Swim the first, stare into the second, budget the whole afternoon.

The river carries the whole case: it rises from the Edwards Aquifer at Spring Lake, has never stopped flowing in recorded history, and sediment cores suggest people have lived beside it for more than ten thousand years — by one archaeological account among the oldest continually inhabited spots in North America. Ride a glass-bottom boat over the springs at the Meadows Center, then float the same water through town in a rented tube.

In 1978 two teenagers hunting arrowheads near the Bosque River found bones that proved to be a nursery herd of Columbian mammoths — 24 uncovered so far, the only recorded evidence of such a herd in the country by the Park Service's accounting. The site became Waco Mammoth National Monument in July 2015. Add the 1950 grain silos at Magnolia Market and the town where Dr Pepper was invented at a drugstore in 1885, and the day fills itself.

Krause Springs does the heavy lifting: 32 springs rise on a 115-acre property the Krause family has run for more than fifty years, feeding a man-made pool and a natural one that flows on toward Lake Travis. The community around it is an unincorporated scatter across three counties, which is exactly how the place feels. Pack a cooler, claim shade early on summer Saturdays, and stay until the light goes.

Billing itself the Most Beautiful Town Square in Texas is confident, but the 1911 Beaux-Arts Williamson County courthouse anchors one of the state's best-preserved Victorian downtowns, so the swagger holds up. South of the square runs Inner Space Cavern, found in spring 1963 by a Texas Highway Department core-drilling crew, open to the public since 1966 and a steady 72 degrees in August. Do the square first, then go underground.

Loblolly pines have no business this far west, which is the draw: the Lost Pines above town are the westernmost stand of the southern pine forest, and the 2011 Bastrop County Complex fire — the most destructive wildfire in Texas history — burned through 96 percent of the state park. Go now anyway. Two million replanted loblollies are coming up around the CCC-built cabins from the 1930s, and a forest reassembling itself is a real thing to see.

A working ranch on the ex-president's own instructions: Johnson willed the property to the public on condition it never become a sterile relic, so Hereford cattle descended from his herd still graze it. He spent roughly a fifth of his presidency at the Texas White House here — under restoration at the moment, though the ranch district stays open — and the boyhood-home district sits in Johnson City, about 50 miles west of Austin.