Lake Buchanan & Inks Lake Cabins

The south shore is where most of Buchanan's cabin stock lives — the string of communities around the dam where Highway 29 meets the lake. The coves here are the tactical advantage: sheltered water off the main body, which matters on a lake this big when the afternoon wind stands the open water up into real chop.

The dam itself is a piece of Texas history — the first dam in the Highland Lakes chain, built in the 1930s, and at the time one of the longest multiple-arch dams anywhere. The lake it made is the biggest of the chain, and the south shore looks straight up that huge western horizon. Sunset off a dam-side deck is the whole sales pitch, and it delivers nightly.

Read listings on this shore with the lake level open in another tab. Cove depth varies a lot from property to property, and in a drought year the difference between a cove that holds water and one that goes to mudflat is the difference between a lake week and a view of one. Hosts who post current dock photos are the ones to trust.

Services are genuinely close — the Buchanan Dam and Tow-road crossroads have bait, groceries, and burgers, and Burnet is fifteen minutes east when you need a real supply run. Of the three areas on this page, this is the least-logistics option.

Tow (rhymes with 'cow') is the top of the lake — the little community up the northeast shore where the pace drops by half and the cabin stock turns into old-family fish camps and low-slung lake houses that have been in the same hands for decades. This is the shore for people who want the lake without a scene of any kind.

The upper lake is the winter show: bald eagles winter on the water up toward the river inlet, and the cold months up here are a legitimate destination in their own right — binoculars on the porch rail, coffee, and the biggest birds in Texas working the open water. It's the rare Highland Lakes booking that makes more sense in January than July.

This is also vineyard country. The Fall Creek area on this end of the lake is one of the older wine-growing spots in Texas, and a tasting afternoon folds naturally into a Tow week — the hill-and-lake drive up this shore is its own reward.

Know what you're buying: fish camps mean fish-camp finish. Many of these places are clean, beloved, and gloriously unrenovated — screen porches and window units, not quartz counters. Read photos honestly and the value up here is the best on the lake.

Inks is the small lake immediately downstream of Buchanan, and it plays by different rules: it's a constant-level lake, held steady no matter what the drought is doing to its big sister upstream. If the non-negotiable part of your trip is that the water is where the water is supposed to be, this is the booking.

Inks Lake State Park is the anchor — pink granite shoreline, the Devil's Waterhole swimming and cliff-jumping cove at the top of the lake, and some of the prettiest camp-and-paddle water in the Hill Country. Cabins near the park gates give you park days without campground nights.

Burnet, ten minutes east, is the services base for this whole page — groceries, hardware, cafes, and a proper town square. It styles itself the Bluebonnet Capital of Texas, and in a good April the roadsides between town and the lakes make the case for the claim. Longhorn Cavern State Park, a show cave dug out by a 1930s CCC crew, sits just south of town for the one rainy day.

The trade for constant water is size: Inks is small, and summer weekends concentrate boats and paddlers into not much lake. It suits swimmers, kayakers, and families better than anyone planning to run big open water — that's what Buchanan next door is for.