Up Early(ish) to Palo Duro Canyon
Canyon, TX - Sun, 13 Mar 2022, 2pm
Our alarms rang too soon this morning. After not getting to bed until after 1am last night due to a flight delay, and then the start of Daylight Saving Time robbing us of an hour of sleep ("Spring Forward"), I woke up after only 4.5 hours of sleep with my 7am alarm. The sky was pitch black outside.
"Enh, it's too early to go hiking anyway," I figured and pressed the snooze button. Then every 9 minutes for the next hour and a half it was Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Sunrise technically came at 8:00 but the sky wasn't bright enough to want to bother for a while after that.
Eventually we got up. We dressed, got food in the hotel breakfast room, packed our hiking gear, and headed off to Palo Duro Canyon State Park. It's only a 15 mile drive from town. Staying close to the park is why we did a late night drive last night!
Palo Duro Canyon State Park bills itself as "The Grand Canyon of Texas". That comparison is... inapt. The Grand Canyon is up to 5,000' deep. Palo Duro Canyon is literally 1/10th that, at 500' deep. Upon seeing this pride of Texas we scoffed and pointed at a shrub and quipped, "It's the Sequoia Redwood of Texas!" 🤣 In California there are dozens of canyons just as deep in residential neighborhoods.
We didn't come all the way to the Texas Panhandle, at nontrivial cost of money and time, though, just to snark. We were at the park... so we did the park thing.
After driving the park loop road (mostly boring) we selected the Lighthouse Trail. "The park's most popular trail!" the brochure gushed. Oftentimes most popular is code for easy and overrated, but in this case it was neither. The Lighthouse rock formation, shown above, is at the far end of a nearly 6 mile roundtrip trail, and seeing it was worth the price of admission- literally and figuratively.
Stay tuned for more pictures from this hike!
Our alarms rang too soon this morning. After not getting to bed until after 1am last night due to a flight delay, and then the start of Daylight Saving Time robbing us of an hour of sleep ("Spring Forward"), I woke up after only 4.5 hours of sleep with my 7am alarm. The sky was pitch black outside.
"Enh, it's too early to go hiking anyway," I figured and pressed the snooze button. Then every 9 minutes for the next hour and a half it was Lather, Rinse, Repeat. Sunrise technically came at 8:00 but the sky wasn't bright enough to want to bother for a while after that.
Eventually we got up. We dressed, got food in the hotel breakfast room, packed our hiking gear, and headed off to Palo Duro Canyon State Park. It's only a 15 mile drive from town. Staying close to the park is why we did a late night drive last night!
Palo Duro Canyon State Park bills itself as "The Grand Canyon of Texas". That comparison is... inapt. The Grand Canyon is up to 5,000' deep. Palo Duro Canyon is literally 1/10th that, at 500' deep. Upon seeing this pride of Texas we scoffed and pointed at a shrub and quipped, "It's the Sequoia Redwood of Texas!" 🤣 In California there are dozens of canyons just as deep in residential neighborhoods.
We didn't come all the way to the Texas Panhandle, at nontrivial cost of money and time, though, just to snark. We were at the park... so we did the park thing.
After driving the park loop road (mostly boring) we selected the Lighthouse Trail. "The park's most popular trail!" the brochure gushed. Oftentimes most popular is code for easy and overrated, but in this case it was neither. The Lighthouse rock formation, shown above, is at the far end of a nearly 6 mile roundtrip trail, and seeing it was worth the price of admission- literally and figuratively.
Stay tuned for more pictures from this hike!