Texas Canyonlands

We realized as we were headed towards Amarillo that we would be near Palo Duro Canyon so we decided to go there. It was very, very hot so we stayed at a private RV park near there instead of down in the canyon at the state park. We really want to stay there sometime but it's a long, steep drive for such a short visit. It was a good decision because when we drove down in the canyon in the Jeep, it was much hotter on the canyon floor, where we would have been camping.

Palo Duro is the second largest canyon in the United States. We enjoyed the short amount of time we spent there and we definitely plan to come back some day when it is cooler so we can do a few hikes and camp down in the canyon.

We drove to Caprock Canyons State Park next and spent four days there. We had a great campsite in the park, just a few feet from the Canyon Rim Trail. It's a wonderful park. They have a herd of buffalo and we saw prairie dogs all over the place.

We saw this park employee moving a rattlesnake away from the restroom area and told him he was brave. He laughed a very nervous laugh and said "I usually scream like a little girl when I see them." I took a picture but it's not very good because I didn't want to get any closer to it. (You might want to look away here, Mom.)

 It was still hot our first day there so we just drove around, looking at the buffalo, the lake and driving through the canyons. That's one thing we really liked about both Palo Duro and Caprocks, you can drive down into the canyons.

We only planned to stay there a few days but ended up staying four days when we found out the temperature was going to be dropping. On our last day there, it was actually kind of chilly and we decided to hike the rim trail. We haven't been doing much hiking due to the heat so this was really great. It was a bit overcast, too, which is also nice for hiking in the southwest. Here are some pictures from our hike...

I really liked this picture of Larry taking pictures of the canyon.

Caprock Canyons is one of our favorite places we've ever camped and we definitely plan to return. We left there Tuesday and drove to Lake Texoma on the Texas/Oklahoma border. It's pretty here but I haven't taken many pictures so I probably won't do a blog post about it. We plan to leave here tomorrow and head to Arkansas as we continue to make our way east.

Thanks for visiting!