Baby Head to Miller Mountain

Baby Head — spelled "Babyhead" on some maps and in the ghost town's mindat entry — sits about 9 miles north of Llano, Texas on Highway 16, marked by the historic Baby Head Cemetery. The roadcut here is one of the best-known rockhounding stops in the Texas Hill Country: it's the type locality for llanite, a porphyritic rhyolite with distinctive blue quartz and reddish microcline feldspar crystals found nowhere else on Earth. The DB's "Miller Mt" almost certainly refers to the historic Miller Mine, which mindat documents as sitting within the same Babyhead Mountain locality — so this is one general collecting corridor along TX-16, not two far-apart destinations. The rock here is part of the billion-year-old Llano Uplift, a dome of exposed Precambrian granite, gneiss, and schist that makes this whole area unusually rich ground for a Texas rockhound.

From Llano, drive north on Texas Highway 16 approximately 8–9 miles to Baby Head Cemetery. The llanite roadcut is visible from the highway near the cemetery. The DB coordinate for this entry lands a few miles closer to Llano than the cemetery itself — treat it as marking the general Llano-to-Baby Head corridor rather than a single precise pin.

This is hard-rock roadcut collecting: bring a sledgehammer and chisels to break larger llanite chunks free, plus safety glasses. Loose chips are plentiful within easy reach of a parked vehicle — you don't need to hike far. No official season or difficulty rating found; regional sources describe it as an easy, accessible stop.

Access here is split and not fully resolved. The llanite roadcut sits in the Texas Highway 16 right-of-way (TxDOT), and it's widely described in rockhounding literature as a place people collect — but no source found states TxDOT's actual policy on roadside rock collecting. Treat the roadcut itself as permission-required/unconfirmed rather than assuming an open invitation, and never step off the shoulder onto adjoining land without asking — most of the surrounding Llano Uplift is private ranch land, and that's true generally across this part of the Hill Country (the same pattern documented for Mason County's fee topaz ranches nearby). The Fredericksburg Rockhounds Club is cited as a local resource for organized access and guidance.