Palo Duro Canyon State Park

I started my day yesterday in Austin and ended it in the bed of a canyon. The chance of overnight rain showers was so great I didn’t even bother setting up my tent. Camped in the backseat of my car in Palo Duro Canyon State Park, I was vindicated as lightning cracked overhead and heavy droplets poured down.

After driving eight hours through small Texas towns and the biggest field of wind turbines I've ever seen, I finally reached the state's Panhandle, an endlessly flat landscape until the ground suddenly drops away. The void in the earth is the second largest canyon in America. 120 miles long and up to 800 feet deep, Palo Duro lives up to its nickname: the “Grand Canyon of Texas.”

I hiked two of Palo Duro's most notable trails. The three-mile Civilian Conservation Corps Trail gives a birds-eye view of the canyon from the west rim and Goodnight Peak. The six-mile Lighthouse Trail twists through the juniper desert to two monolithic hoodoos named for their resemblance to a beacon and the ship it is guiding to shore.

During my afternoon hikes, the sun ignited the fiery red rock in the wide canyon's sloped walls. The many layers of rock are evidence of mineral deposits during different epochs of time. The next morning, a cloudy sunrise bathed the canyon in a murky blue, harkening back hundreds of millions of years when this land was under water.

The only reason Palo Duro is not a national park is because the federal government wasn’t willing to buy up private land in the 1930s so locals pushed to make it a state park instead. The park opened in 1934, made possible with New Deal funds to build roads, trails, and facilities. Public land status aside, Palo Duro is a geologic spectacle on par with any national park.