Palo Duro Canyon: The Grand Canyon of Texas

Twenty miles east of Amarillo, a crack opens in the Llano Estacado and swallows the world. Palo Duro Canyon is the second-largest canyon system in the United States, and it is almost entirely invisible until you are standing at its rim. The high plains give no warning. The grass runs flat to the horizon in every direction, and then there is a sudden drop of eight hundred feet, sometimes a thousand, into a landscape that looks nothing like what is above it.

The canyon runs roughly twenty-five to forty miles long and averages six miles wide. Its walls hold two hundred and forty million years of geological time stacked in bands of orange, red, brown, yellow, maroon, and white. The red and orange come from iron-rich Triassic mudstones. The white and pale layers are Permian evaporites, salt and gypsum beds. The whole formation was cut by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River working its way east through the caprock over millions of years.

The Comanche called it the canyon country home ground. Archaeological evidence suggests human habitation going back ten thousand to fifteen thousand years. Captain Randolph Marcy, sent by the army to map the headwaters of the Red River, stumbled onto the canyon in eighteen fifty-two and called it the most remarkable topography he had seen in his extensive western surveys.

The name Palo Duro comes from Spanish meaning hard stick, a reference to the juniper and mesquite wood the canyon provided, valuable timber in a treeless region. That timber drew the Comanche to winter here. It drew Charles Goodnight in eighteen seventy-six. And it still draws more than four hundred thousand visitors a year to what Texans have always called, with justification, the Grand Canyon of Texas.