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| Postcard image of the Sad Monkey Railroad in its heyday |
Riding the Sad Monkey was always fun, and it was an experience I repeated well into adulthood. Unfortunately, the train stopped running in the 1980s, and the only signs that it was ever there are the ghost patterns of the rail bed that now serve as horseback riding trails.
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| Outlines of the Sad Monkey rail bed |
I snapped the photo above a few years ago when my old hiking buddy Rick, my wife Susan, and I were spending a weekend in the canyon. We were standing on a table rock overlooking the amphitheater where the summer musical Texas is performed. The rock is also at the end of a hiking trail that traces the route workers used when the state park was developed in the 1930s. That's when the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) built the roads, picnic areas, and stone buildings in the park.
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| The point just beyond the table rock is the top of the Sad Monkey formation. |
It's been almost three decades since I lived in the Texas Panhandle. That's where Palo Duro Canyon is located—twelve miles east of the city of Canyon. I still visit the canyon when I travel to see family and friends in Amarillo, and it pleases me to see that the park is still being developed. The CCC Trail is one of the most recent additions. The legendary Red Spicer, a great supporter of the canyon, reestablished the trail in 2006, a few years before he died. Susan, Rick, and I were fortunate enough to meet Red one August morning when he was hard at work, pickax in hand.
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| Red Spicer working on the CCC Trail |
It's the trails, the hiking, and the exploration of new territory that have always appealed to me. From the time I was a kid, I always enjoyed striking out into new territory, and the CCC Trail is one of those great places to explore.
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| Rick and me hiking a section of the CCC Trail |
The most challenging trail in the canyon doesn't have a name, but it runs from the sixth water crossing (the park road cuts across the Prairie Dog fork of the Red River) to the western rim of the canyon. Rick and I dubbed it the Mesquite Park Trail for the flatland above the canyon that we explored for several months, searching for a rock formation called the Kneeling Camel. For an extended chronicle of that and additional Palo Duro Canyon adventures, read my other blog, Gecko Hill.
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| The rim below Mesquite Park |
The most famous trail in the canyon is the one that leads to the Lighthouse and a lesser-known formation called Castle Rock. It's an open, mostly unshaded trail that gets brutally hot in the summer, but it leads to a spectacular payoff, a dramatic view of those two imposing hoodoos, columns of sedimentary rock with capstones.
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| Castle Peak and the Lighthouse |
I first hiked the Lighthouse Trail when I was a teenager, and I have revisited it many times in the intervening years. When we were in graduate school at West Texas State University, Rick and I organized a Saturday morning hike to the Lighthouse, led by one of our favorite English professors, Dr. Russell Sparling. When we reached the end of the trail, he read aloud from Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. It included this famous passage: "We need the tonic of wildness .... At the same time that we are earnest to explore and learn all things, we require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be indefinitely wild, unsurveyed and unfathomed by us because unfathomable. We can never have enough of nature."
This "tonic of wildness" has always appealed to me—the sense of nature untamed, of human beings' fragile hold on this earth. Strangely, I take comfort in recognizing my own insignificance in the grand scale of nature.
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| The Lighthouse, as seen from the western side |
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