Palo Duro Canyon

The eighth largest canyon in America, cut where the High Plains stop

South of Amarillo the flat High Plains of the Llano Estacado simply stop. The Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, after winding across the level tableland, drops off the Caprock Escarpment, and over the Pleistocene, as the region rose, it cut Palo Duro Canyon: about 45 miles long, six miles wide on average and up to twenty in places, and around 800 feet deep, closer to 1,000 where the hills stand behind it. Its name is Spanish for hard stick, and its banded walls and mesas have earned it the title of the Grand Canyon of Texas.

The walls read like a book from the bottom up. The red lower slopes and canyon floor are the Permian Quartermaster Formation, laid down along a shallow sea and on dry tidal flats, streaked with white satin-spar gypsum. Above it lie the maroon, lavender, grey and orange shales of the Triassic Tecovas, deposited in streams and swamps and holding the bones of phytosaurs, amphibians and lungfish, petrified wood and geodes. The harder Trujillo sandstone forms the ledges and benches, and where it caps softer shale it leaves hoodoos, among them the Lighthouse, the canyon's signature, reached by a six-mile round-trip trail. At the rim, the Ogallala Formation, eroded from the young Rockies, carries fossils of sabre-toothed cats, bone-crushing dogs, mastodons and long-necked camels, and its porous beds hold the Ogallala Aquifer that waters the High Plains.

People have lived here for 10,000 to 15,000 years, drawn by water, game and shelter. Members of the Coronado expedition reached it in 1541, when Apaches lived in the canyon; the Mescalero call it Nił'e'agutel, canyon in the plains. Comanche and Kiowa, mounted on horses descended from Spanish stock, later took it over, and it stayed in Native hands until 1874, when an expedition under Colonel Ranald Mackenzie captured some 1,200 of their horses and slaughtered them in nearby Tule Canyon, forcing the Comanche and Kiowa onto reservations in Oklahoma.

Georgia O'Keeffe, who ran the art department at West Texas State Normal College near Amarillo from 1916 to 1918, called the canyon "a burning, seething cauldron" and painted it in blazing yellows, blues and reds. One of those paintings, Special #21, was stolen from the New Mexico Museum of Art in 2003 and has never been recovered. Today the canyon lies within Palo Duro Canyon State Park, built by Civilian Conservation Corps workers, with more than 30 miles of trails for hiking, biking and riding, cabins on the rim and the canyon floor, and the outdoor musical TEXAS staged every summer.