Palo Duro
I’ve been lucky my whole life. I’ve traveled to a lot of remarkable and beautiful places, but this canyon, carved into the great Texas plains where I was born, will always be number one.
The canyon was downcut by the Prairie Dog Town Fork Red River (great name, right?) during the Pleistocene era, when the whole region was geologically uplifted. My uncle suspects the Canyon was carved out relatively quickly as a natural dam of the lake (Canyon all the way back to Umbarger) gave way and all that lake drained rapidly and catastrophically carved out the majority of the Canyon's depth in only a few days. Most of the strata in the canyon (see some of that beautiful geological layer cake in the photos below) were deposited during the Permian and Triassic periods. To casually walk amongst the remnants of such deep time (on an earthly scale) can put things into perspective if you take the opportunity to slow down and pay attention.
“There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, — no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair.”
Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Texas
