Everyone in Amarillo said we needed to go to to Palo Duro Canyon. It is supposed to be America's second largest canyon only second to the Grand Canyon. We headed out to the canyon on Friday.
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| Palo Duro Canyon State Park |
We first stopped by the visitor center to get some information about the park.
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| Visitor Center |
The most famous rock formation is the Lighthouse. You could see it with binoculars from the visitors center. It was about a 6 mile walk to it from the valley floor. Patty's new camera took a pretty good picture of it from the visitor center.
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| Lighthouse formation |
Here is a close-up we took.... (you could barely see the formation without binoculars).
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| Lighthouse closeup |
Here is a spectacular viewpoint we found.
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| Viewpoint |
Another rock formation.
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| Views everywhere |
We saw this spot that looked like a cave. We decided to hike to it and see what it was.
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| Cave in the cliff |
We got to the cave and noticed that there was a hole in the back of it. You can also see a vertical white line in the red to the left of the hole. This is called Satin Spar Gypsum. It is basically a crystallized mineral.
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| Red dirt with Satin Spar Gypsum |
As we continued on we came across water crossing number 6.
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| Water crossing # 6 |
Unfortunately it was closed and we had to turn around. You can see mud clear up above the 5' spot on the sign.
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| Crossing closed |
It was time to go hiking. We found an easy trail called Sunflower trail. It is 2 miles round trip. Being that we haven't hiked since Oregon we thought that would be a good trail for us.
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| Sunflower Trail |
All the trails have a thermometer at the trail heads. What a great idea. It was 75 degrees when we started this hike. Warm but nice.
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| 75 degrees |
Here is our trail. Most of the time at the tenth of a mile there were yellow mile markers. It let you know you were still on the trail and how far you had walked.
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| Sunflower Trail |
A couple places were eroded. We went to the right here.
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| To the right! |
This was really pretty here. You can really see an example if the Satin Spar Gypsum here. Just to the left of the trail on the other side of the trees is a creek with running water.
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| More Gypsum |
We made it to the mile marker. It was uphill the last tenth of a mile.
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| Made it! |
After hiking back we looked for a place to have lunch. We found this turkey but since we had bologna sandwiches we decided to let him go play some more!
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| Turkey |
We found these nice picnic benches under shade. Had a nice lunch break.
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| Mmmmm, good sammie! |
We checked out the different campgrounds and found this Airstream club having a rally. Tons of Airstream trailers! :)
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| Airistream Rally |
We saw on their map they also had a half mile nature walk. It turned out to be kind of wiped out from severe rain, but we still walked it.
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| Nature Trail |
The trail was really rutted in some places and we saw no "nature" signs anywhere but we still walked it.
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| Trail |
It went down to the creek and then circled back up to where it started in a loop.
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| Creek |
By this time it was getting late. We decided we had seen alot and we were getting tired. We had a very nice day at Palo Duro Canyon.
That's it for today!
God Bless you all!
Brian and Patty
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