Texas lands in the middle of a national outdoor ranking — and the math explains why

Texas sells itself on wide-open spaces. A new national ranking of the best states for outdoor enthusiasts puts it squarely in the middle of the pack.

SmileHub, a nonprofit that rates charities and publishes data studies, compared all 50 states across 18 metrics — air quality, forest cover, shoreline, hiking trails, campsites, ski facilities, dark-sky areas and more — and ranked Texas 23rd, with an overall score of 42.86. Montana topped the list, followed by Alaska, Colorado, Utah and Vermont. Only Mississippi, Oklahoma and Arkansas finished lower than the middle; the bottom of the list runs through the Deep South and southern Plains.

The finish lands at a moment when more Americans are heading outdoors than ever. A record 181.1 million people — nearly 60% of the population age 6 and older — took part in outdoor recreation last year, according to the Outdoor Industry Association.

A formula that favors small states

The ranking sorts each state into three categories, but they are nowhere near equal. Outdoor activity access counts for 70 of the 100 possible points. Environmental quality is worth 20, and economic impact and job opportunities just 10.

That weighting matters for how Texas finished. The state ranked 18th in activity access — unremarkable, and in the category that decides most of the score. It placed 18th again in economic impact, and 48th in environmental quality, its weakest mark, ahead of only Indiana and Illinois.

So the easy story — that bad environmental numbers sank Texas — does not quite hold. The 48th-place environmental finish is the state’s ugliest figure, but it carries only a fifth of the weight. What actually keeps Texas at 23rd is a middle-of-the-road showing in the access category that dominates everything else.

And that category is scored almost entirely per capita: hiking trails per person, campsites per person, ski facilities per person, even geocaches per person. Per-capita scoring rewards states with small populations and big backcountry, which is why Montana, Wyoming, Alaska and Vermont cluster near the top. A state with 31 million residents starts at a structural disadvantage no matter how much land it has.

Big in dollars, smaller per person

The verdict sits oddly against the state’s actual outdoor economy, which is one of the largest in the country.

Texas generated $3 billion in boating and fishing value in 2024, third behind only Florida and California, and led every state in the manufacturing of outdoor-recreation goods, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. By raw dollars, Texas is an outdoor heavyweight.

But outdoor recreation is a smaller slice of the Texas economy — in the range of 2% to 4% of state output, similar to California and Florida — than it is in a place like Hawaii, where it tops 6%, or in the mountain states where a single river town can anchor a county. Texas does an enormous amount of outdoor recreation. It is simply a smaller share of a very large economy.

The categories that describe the Hill Country

For Kerr County readers, the metrics that actually lift Texas up the list read almost like a description of home. The study rewards hiking trails, campsites, fishing access and dark-sky areas — the assets that draw visitors to the Guadalupe River, Kerrville-Schreiner Park and the broader Hill Country, one of the few stretches of Texas still dark enough for serious stargazing.

If Texas has an outdoor identity that a national ranking can recognize, much of it lives in this part of the state.

That identity now carries a weight no scorecard measures. The July 4, 2025, flood that killed 119 people in Kerr County tore down the same Guadalupe River that anchors the area’s recreation economy — a reminder that the Hill Country’s greatest outdoor draw is also, in the wrong conditions, its gravest hazard. How the county balances river access, tourism and public safety has become one of the defining questions of its recovery.

A snapshot, not a verdict

Like most state-by-state studies of its kind, the SmileHub ranking is a snapshot built on a particular set of metrics and a particular set of weights. Shift the formula — count total trails instead of trails per person, or weight environmental quality as heavily as access — and the order changes.

But the broad picture is one Texans might recognize: a state with extraordinary natural range, an outsized outdoor economy and real work left to do on the environmental side of the ledger.