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The ratio of good publicly accessible outdoor locations to population/land area is unfortunately low and skews westwards away from the busy triangle and interstates, which filters enough normies that the reputation is actually much lower than it deserves. It's always surprising how most people genuinely unaware that a state with 10+ mountain ranges has any mountains at all, or that the actual representative plant is the prickly pear and not a saguaro, especially when the state is so famous world wide. You will find a lot of ignorance and misrepresentation on this topic because people are sharing their impressions from driving down I35 or visiting Dallas once and thinking that it's representative of 260k+ sq miles of land.
The ecoregions are interesting and quite diverse, however this crossroads diversity is actually the state's principle downfall outdoor scenery-wise as you can find "better" versions of each biome in the adjacent territory (better swamps in Louisiana, better sky islands in New Mexico, better sierra oriental in Coahuila and Nuevo Leon). The only exception to this in my mind is the Hill Country, which perhaps represents the most finely distilled Texas landscape qua Texas landscape – but sadly, at this point, too overly-developed and drought-stricken to be a genuine outdoors destination, more of a river tubing and cultural town-hopping destination now.
Regardless, there is a distinct charm to the unique blends of biome you can discover: sky islands that are half Mexico and half classic American West, swaths of Hill Country that are half Ozarks and half Chihuahuan desert. This charm has a way of taking hold over people, myself included. It's kind of like a reverse of the "bigger in Texas" slogan, where Texas is wide enough to hold other pieces of land in miniature – the Davis Mountains, for instance, are like a smaller, quainter, but eerily similar copy of the Santa Rita Mountains in Arizona.
Pic is public land in the Hill Country in December
