# Palo Duro Canyon



## The Hooded Claw (Oct 12, 2009)

I spent two years living near Amarillo in the mid-1980s. There was a joke at the time "it's always off-season at the Club Med Amarillo." Not really fair, there are some interesting things to do in the area. I went back there over this last weekend and spent several days in the area for the first time since I lived there years ago. My main goal, and the highlight of the trip, was to hike the Light House trail at Palo Duro Canyon State Park.

This was taken near the start of the trail. There's a small spur of rock that is sort of a teaser for the real Lighthouse at the top of the ridge.



There were others on the trail, a handful of hikers, several mountain bikers whizzing by at high speed, and this being Texas, the obligatory woman on a horse:



If you look through the branches of the tree at upper left, you can see two spurs of rock sticking up from the ridge. The spur on the right is my destination.

Maybe one of the equestrians here can enlighten us why the horse appears to be wearing tennis shoes!

At the base of the ridge, zooming in to look up at The Lighthouse:



Here I am almost at the top after a difficult scramble at the ridge to the mesa top.



Near the base of The Lighthouse. Note the size of the hikers.



And a triumphal photo at the top of the Mesa. I didn't go any higher than this!



The park claims the trail is 5 1/2 miles long. My FitBit reports that I walked over 8 miles with all my detours, sidetracks, and wandering around. It also says that I climbed the equivalent of 95 flights of stairs on the hike! Over half of these were the scramble up the ridge that you can see behind the lady on the horse. That was the only part of the hike that was difficult, there was no real trail. There is supposed to be one, steep but with railroad tie steps, but neither I nor any of the people I talked to at the top found it. I came up basically finding my own path, and went down through a gulley another hiker pointed out to me as the least bad route.

My FitBit generated this timeline of steps climbed, and it is amusing to see that I climbed over 50 building floor equivalents in half an hour scrambling up the side of the mesa! That sounds like a lot in a short time, but it is only about a floor and a half per minute.


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## cinisajoy (Mar 10, 2013)

Love this.


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## R. Doug (Aug 14, 2010)

Reminds me a bit of the Red Rock areas of the Four Corner, Sedona, and Monument Valley.


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