The eighth largest canyon in America, cut where the High Plains stop
The eighth largest canyon system in the United States, and outside Texas hardly anybody has heard of it. Palo Duro runs about 45 miles through the Panhandle below Amarillo, averages six miles across and opens to twenty in places, and drops around 800 feet, closer to a thousand where the hills stand up behind it. The name is Spanish for hard stick. The banded rock and the steep mesa walls have earned it the nickname the Grand Canyon of Texas, and it is cut into the Caprock Escarpment, the line where the flat High Plains simply stop.
