They Can't Take That Away

This morning my wife Susan and I were returning home from a trip to Austin. We were listening for the first time to Bob Schneider's new CD Burden of Proof, which we bought this weekend at Waterloo Records, my favorite music store. Somewhere between Austin and Bastrop, a song called "John Lennon" popped up. It was only then that I remembered that today was December 8th, the 33rd anniversary of Lennon's death.

December 8th, 1980, is one of the worst days in my memory. I was a senior theatre major at West Texas State University, and that night I was typing the final draft of a creative writing class final project, a one-act play entitled The River Knows (an allusion to a song by another dead rock star, Jim Morrison). My project was due in two days, but I had to stop for the night. Between phone calls from several friends, who wanted to commiserate, and the inability to focus on my work, I delayed typing until the next day.

Kevin was the first to call. We were best friends in high school but went our separate ways after graduation. We shared a common love for all kinds of music, the Beatles' most of all.  Kevin had been watching Monday Night Football when Howard Cosell announced the sad news that Lennon had been killed outside the Dakota apartment building in New York City, his wife Yoko Ono by his side.  I was relieved to receive the news from an old friend. It gave us a chance to reminisce, to share in our grief, our sense of disbelief.

Every year since then, as December 8th approaches, I become keenly aware of this horrible anniversary, but in recent years it often takes something to jar the memory loose on the actual date—a song on the radio, a headline in the newspaper. It might be a sign of my age and the increasingly elusive nature of remembering things, but I think it's more than that. There's only so much grieving I can stand to bear over something as senseless as the murder of an artist … by a fan, no less. The mind still refuses to comprehend, refuses to accept.

Then, there's the music. As the years recede and more and more musical icons of my youth die—including George Harrison, who's been gone for twelve years now—the music is still there, is still a vital part of my life. Last month, for instance, a new collection of Beatles recordings was released, the second volume of BBC performances, On Air—Live at the BBC, Volume 2. As soon as I listened to the CDs, I was taken back to my youth and was reminded of the intense energy of the the Beatles' early music.

Back to Bob Schneider—the song that started me on this post begins and ends with the following lines: "I don't care what they say / we'll love forever today / they can't take that away." The song is remarkably upbeat, and it felt good for once to observe Lennon's passing in such a positive way. All day I have played the song repeatedly, and the lyrics will continue to reverberate in my head as I settle down to sleep tonight.

Thank you, Bob. Thank you, John.

The Death March

I'm not the first person to say, "Adventure begins when things go wrong," but on an August afternoon in 2005, my wife Susan and I weren't setting out to have an adventure, just an invigorating hike in Palo Duro Canyon.  I had been on this trail dozens of times—but not in ten years, and a lot can change in that time.  The trail once led horseback riders to the western rim of the canyon, a section called Mesquite Park on topographical maps but an area I had always referred to, simply, as the Mesa. The trail had not been maintained for decades.  Rick, my hiking buddy in graduate school, and I had used this route when we were searching for an elusive rock formation called the Kneeling Camel.

Dog Food Mountain—the western rim of the
canyon is visible in the background.

The first obstacle on the trail is a section of loose clay Rick and I long ago dubbed Dog Food Mountain, so-named because of its crumbly Gravy Train-like consistency.  Once Susan and I topped the "mountain," the next challenge was making the final scramble to the canyon rim.  After walking beneath an overhang, a sheer cliff face of twenty feet, we looked for the familiar footholds notched into the sandstone.

The overhang on the rim of the canyon—
we ascended the ridge in the distance.

From that point the climb to the top was less than ten feet, but sections of the bluff had crumbled, making it difficult to find a stable place to make the final ascent.  From the top we had a majestic view of the canyon six hundred feet below, the eastern rim about a mile across.

The view from Mesquite Park

Our destination was the old line camp Rick and I had discovered twenty-five years earlier.  Then, as now, the route was a direct line up a rise to a dirt road, perhaps a quarter of a mile away.  The problem was what used to be regularly grazed pastureland was now overgrown.  Mesquite Park was living up to its name; the mesquite trees were so dense Susan and I could barely see ten feet ahead.  However, the road was still there (though evidently no longer used), and it led us straight to the line camp, a mile away.

The windmill was still visible from the road, but
everything around it was overgrown.

The windmill worked, but the water
in the tanks looked murky.

The camp was tucked in a ravine and out of sight from the road, but we followed a short spur to a nearby wind pump, its turbine and blades visible atop a steel tower.  The windmill looked the same as it always had, still pumping water into three tanks.  As elsewhere on the Mesa, the area was overgrown with wild grass, sunflowers, and, of course, mesquite trees.

With cattle no longer grazing on the Mesa, the area
had become overgrown.

It was so dense, in fact, that the line camp itself was not visible.  I was worried at first that it had been demolished, but soon enough I found it—or what remained of it.

This is how the line camp look
when I discovered it in the 1980s.

And this is the way the old cabin looked in 2005.

Time and the elements had not treated the old one-room cabin well.  While three walls were still standing, the back side had collapsed, taking most of the roof with it.

The view from the back of the line camp—the mesquite
trees will soon take over.

Susan and I spent half an hour poking around the old camp, photographing it extensively.  We knew this would be the last time we would ever see the place.  Even if we returned, there would be nothing left but a pile of old rotting timber.

Remains of an old stove

The route down is usually the easiest part of the hike, but that assumes you don't get lost.  Because the trail was faint, I veered to the left after the initial descent and didn't discover my mistake until we were a third of the way down.  At that point we intersected a draw and decided to follow it down.

I took this photo of my trekking pole and hat
just before we descended from the Mesa.

A hazard of climbing down a draw—apart from the potential for flash flooding—is sudden drops, sometimes as great as ten feet straight down.  Fortunately, we didn't encounter any terrain we couldn't negotiate, and once we reached bottom, we knew which direction would take us back to our car.

The summer of 2005 was particularly wet, and near the end of our hike, we had to walk through rushes that had been knocked down by recent flooding.  The Prairie Dog Fork of the Red River is narrow and, therefore, prone to overrun its banks.  The river was the final obstacle between us and the end of our hike—or so we thought.

As we slogged through the rushes, Susan yelled out to me, and my immediate response was to turn around and head back to her.  At that point she screamed again and told me to stop.  "You just stepped over a rattlesnake—twice."  Sure enough, a drowsy rattler was coiled inches away from me.  Sidestepping the snake, I soon realized there were more of them in our path, and even though we prodded the rushes with our trekking poles, the snakes made no obvious movements or sounds.  As we stepped over them, as many as five or six more, the snakes merely constricted, their response almost docile.

Between encountering the snakes and reaching the river bank, no more than five minutes elapsed, but time seemed to stop.  As we waded across the swift-moving current, red with the iron-rich soil for which the river gets its name, Susan and I were relieved to leave the snakes (and the unpredictable trail) behind.  We were even happier to return to our cabin, where we could shed our wet hiking clothes and reflect on this strange adventure.

The CCC-era cabin where we stayed in Palo Duro Canyon

The Kneeling Camel, Part Two

Jutting across the western edge of Palo Duro Canyon State Park, Mesquite Park separates Palo Duro from a smaller offshoot called Cita Canyon.  Mesquite Park narrows as it drops 600 feet until it reaches bottom at the Prairie Dog fork of the Red River.  In the mid-1980s, my friend Rick and I hiked several times across Mesquite Park, or the mesa, as we called it, in search of the Kneeling Camel, a little-known rock formation in Cita Canyon.  We were graduate students at West Texas State University in the town of Canyon, twelve miles west of Palo Duro Canyon.

A utility road drawn on our topographical map made it easy to keep track of the areas we had explored along and below the southern edge of the mesa.  The first time Rick and I followed the road, we spotted a windmill a hundred yards down a slope, and hidden in a thicket of thorny mesquite trees stood a ramshackle building, just above the rim of Cita Canyon.

The line camp, as we first saw it beyond a windmill tank

We figured the one-room cabin was a line camp built in the early 1900s, but it been abandoned long before we discovered it.  All the window panes were busted out, siding planks were broken, and gaping holes in the roof filled the interior with sunlight. 

The line camp in 1985

A "Posted" sign was nailed next to an open doorway, and the following warning was scrawled on a broken door panel: "Tear up this place and I'll tear up your ass." 

A Folger's coffee can used to patch a hole inside the cabin

An old wagon left to rot among the mesquite trees

Rick and I stopped at the old line camp every time we hiked across the mesa.  The summer following our Kneeling Camel excursions, we pitched camp in a nearby clearing, and in the night we heard animals moving past our tents.  Their unmistakable yips told us they were coyotes.  We also heard  the windmill groaning in the night every time the blades caught a stiff breeze and the turbine spun around.

I snapped this photo on a return visit to the line camp in 2005.

The windmill was a sixteen-foot Aermotor, and since it still pumped water, it gave us a reliable place to cool our feet.  Cattle grazed the scrubby land and could often be seen near the three water tanks the windmill supplied.  Twenty years later I discovered how different the mesa looked when the land was no longer leased for grazing, but that's another story. 

By our third or fourth attempt to locate the Kneeling Camel, Rick and I had gotten discouraged.  Every time we went exploring, we had to allow at least an extra hour and a half to get from our car on the canyon floor to the rim of Cita Canyon on the far side of the mesa.  Late one afternoon in March, we arrived at the edge of an area we had previously explored, and that gave us about two hours before it was time to head back.  (I knew what it was like to scurry down a gorge after sunset, and it was not an experience I was eager to repeat.)  However, we had learned how to make the best use of our time.  Our map was carefully marked, and we always left cairns beside the road when there weren't obvious landmarks. 

That's me pointing at a stump—we used it and other landmarks
to gauge our progress in exploring Cita Canyon.

Around five o'clock Rick and I were hiking along a narrow ridge when we spotted a freestanding formation across a gorge that we thought might be the hump of the Kneeling Camel.  It was smaller than we had expected, but it looked promising.  We returned to the top of the ridge and approached the formation from above.  

Rick standing on a ridge above what appeared to be the Kneeling Camel

The top of the capstone was a good thirty feet beyond the ridge and about ten feet below it.  From that vantage point we were standing behind what appeared to be the hump, but we couldn't tell if there were remnants of the two smaller columns, which would have been telltale signs that this hoodoo was indeed the Camel.  It was only when we scrambled down into the canyon to get a closer look from the side that knew we had found the Kneeling Camel.  To the left of the hump, we could see two stubs of the missing columns—the neck and the extraneous piece between it and the hump.

Rick hiking down to the Kneeling Camel

It was two hours before sunset, so we had only thirty minutes to examine the rock formation.  It stood approximately twenty feet tall, was fifteen feet wide, and stretched eight feet across at the widest point of the capstone.  Rick appears in three of the photographs I took that day, making it easier to get a sense of scale.  

The hump of the Camel is certainly not an enormous rock formation—especially in comparison to Lighthouse Peak, Palo Duro Canyon's iconic hoodoo, which rises more than 150 feet—but the Kneeling Camel was a more meaningful find, not least because of the time and effort Rick and I invested in looking for it.  And the Camel is something I remember vividly because I shared the experience with a great hiking buddy.

When it was time to head back, I felt a twinge of sadness.  We had ended our quest, and I knew I might never see the Kneeling Camel again.  As Rick and I climbed out of Cita Canyon, looking back at the capstone every few seconds, the Kneeling Camel disappeared from view.  My recollection is that we spoke very little on the return trip, and then, as now, the experience felt illusory, perhaps because it happened so quickly.  Yet, we had accomplished our goal; we had found the Camel and had proven the old ranger wrong.  Even though it was no longer the glorious formation it had been half a century earlier, the Kneeling Camel was still recognizable and undeniably majestic.

My last photograph of the Kneeling Camel

A few years ago my brother Don asked me about the Kneeling Camel.  He had been talking to friend who had recently read about it, and they wanted to know I could give them directions.  (Don lives in Amarillo, thirty miles from Palo Duro Canyon, but I live 600 miles away, in Houston.)  I told him that I could probably lead them in person to the Camel, but because I no longer had the map Rick and I had annotated in such detail, I would have a difficult time explaining the route.  Besides, the landscape of the mesa has changed dramatically in the last twenty-five years, and the trail Rick and I followed is now overgrown.

In 2005, more than a decade after I had last climbed to the top of the mesa, my wife Susan and I retraced the route.  We weren't looking for the Kneeling Camel, but we visited the old line camp, and our adventure yielded its own dramatic surprises.  Susan affectionately refers to that hiking trip as the Death March.  In my next post I will explain why.

More about Hoodoos

Before posting the long-overdue final installment on my search for the Kneeling Camel, I want to reflect on the grandeur of hoodoos, those elegant columns of sedimentary rock and harder capstones.  Undoubtedly, hoodoos have always captured the human imagination—depicting the dramatic tension between the everlasting and the ephemeral, nature in transition.  There is a delicately balanced rock in Palo Duro Canyon I have walked under dozens of times over the years, and every time I step beneath it, I pause and look thirty feet up, wondering if this will be that inevitable moment when the boulder comes crashing down, smashing me into its destiny.

Palo Duro Canyon has an array of hoodoos, some better known than others.  One is called the Devil's Tombstone, a precariously tilted slab of stone frozen in mid-slide with Old Scratch's invisible hand seemingly holding it in place. 

1930s-era postcard of The Devil's
Tombstone—the cowboy and his horse
appear to be superimposed.

An examination of old and new photographs suggests there are—or at least were—actually two hoodoos in the canyon bearing that name, one immortalized in a 1930s hand-tinted picture postcard and one that can still be seen on the Givens, Spicer, and Lowry Running Trail. [Correction: the image below is of a formation called the Red Star Ridge hoodoo.]

Correction: This is a formation called the Red Star Ridge
hoodoo, as it looked when I photographed it in 2004.

The five-mile (one-way) GSL Trail provides the most scenic route to the Lighthouse, the best known hoodoo in the state park.  If you have ever driven past a billboard advertising "the Grand Canyon of Texas," you have undoubtedly seen an image of Lighthouse Peak, an enormous rock formation that rises 150 feet from an elevated pedestal bridge that leads to another imposing formation called Castle Peak.  It's too bad the two features are so close together since the Lighthouse overshadows its otherwise imposing neighbor.

Vintage postcard of the Lighthouse—
Castle Peak is visible on the right.

When I first hiked the original trail to the Lighthouse in the mid-1970s, its capstone was flat, thick, and seemingly indestructible.  In the decades since, its top has slowly eroded, and it is possible I will get to see it break loose in my lifetime, a prospect that excites me as much as it disturbs me.

Another view of the Lighthouse and Castle
Peaks, as I photographed them in 2004—
the capstone has eroded in the nearly forty
years since I first hiked to the Lighthouse.

Sitting in the shadow of the Lighthouse in 1983 when I was in graduate school at West Texas State University (in nearby Canyon), I listened to one of my favorite English professors, Russell Sparling, speak of the humbling power of nature.  The landscape overwhelms us with its grandeur and scale, he told me, and it reminds us of our own mortality.

That brings me back to the Kneeling Camel.  When my good friend Rick and I were combing the archives of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum many years ago, we were puzzled by conflicting images of the Camel.  While most photographs and postcards showed the formation consisting of two parts—the slender neck and head, the much larger hump—earlier images showed an additional column wedged between neck and hump.  Later photos revealed the broken base of that mystery column, and I long wondered how it managed to topple while the equally delicate but more exposed neck had survived.

Though I have no proof, I am convinced that early twentieth century visitors knocked out the middle column.  With three columns, after all, the formation only vaguely resembled a camel.  In their naming (and taming) the formation, the men who long ago posed on its tenuous ridge made the Camel their own and recreated an image they could understand and control.  Like so many explorers before them, those men who "discovered" the Kneeling Camel stole its natural identity and transformed it into something they wanted it to be.

This hand-tinted postcard of the Kneeling Camel amplifies
the projected animal characteristics of the hoodoo.
Note the pronounced eye and snout.

When Rick and I asked a seasoned park ranger to help us locate the elusive Kneeling Camel, he did his best to discourage us.  "The Kneeling Camel doesn't exist anymore," he insisted.  "I could lead you right to it, but you would never recognize anything even remotely resembling a camel."

We wondered if the old ranger was telling the truth or if he was merely trying to keep us from exploring the dangerous fringes of the park.  And who could blame him?  From the time I was a kid, I had heard stories about day hikers getting hurt or, worse yet, getting killed, while heading off-trail in the canyon, and it was the rangers who had to rescue them or carry their bodies out.  Rick and I were not dissuaded, however.  If the Kneeling Camel had survived the better part of the twentieth century, we were going to find it.  It was just of a matter of time.

The Kneeling Camel, Part One

Maybe it was the name that captured my sense of adventure.  The Kneeling Camel conjured up images of Arabian deserts and Bedouin camps, hardly the sort of thing you would expect to see on the High Plains of the Texas Panhandle.  But it was the rock formation itself that drew me to unexplored regions of Palo Duro Canyon.  My buddy Rick and I first learned about the Kneeling Camel while rummaging through the archives of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum in the city of Canyon.  We were West Texas State University graduate students, English literature scholars pretending to be history majors to gain access to seemingly endless file cabinets loaded with yellowing newspaper clippings and fragile photographs.

1930s postcard of the Kneeling Camel, Cita Canyon

Ah, the photographs.  We found images of CCC workers from the 1930s posed on a rocky outcrop, and behind them the most glorious formation that really did look like a camel.  You could almost make out an eye and snout on its craggy profile, and, of course, it had a hump.  Then, there were the watercolor and hand-tinted picture postcards that gave the Camel a storybook quality.

I knew all about hoodoos—columns of exposed dirt and rock, capped with slabs of sandstone or other sedimentary rock that preserved the distinctive structure.  Palo Duro Canyon's iconic natural formation is a hoodoo named the Lighthouse.  One hundred fifty feet tall, it dominates the landscape as hearty visitors approach.  As a teenager my first real hiking adventure was a six-mile trek, there and back, to see the Lighthouse.

The Lighthouse, Palo Duro Canyon

The Kneeling Camel was altogether different—remote, rarely seen, relatively unknown—and, as we discovered in our research, it overlooked Cita Canyon, a place we had never explored, just beyond the southern border of the state park.  Plus, there was an element of uncertainty that appealed to Rick and me.  We read that the formation had been damaged years before, and when we asked a park ranger to help us locate it, he insisted the Kneeling Camel had completely disappeared and would be impossible to recognize.  We dismissed his claims, convinced he was merely trying to keep us away from undeveloped areas of the park.

We knew the challenge was enormous, but armed with a topographical map, trail snacks, and canteens full of water, Rick and I set out one Saturday morning in March, hoping to find our quarry the first time out.  Based on our research, including annotated maps, we knew, within a mile, where the Camel had to be located.  How hard could it be to find it?

What we hadn't anticipated were two obstacles.  First, we couldn't access Cita Canyon directly but would have to climb to the western rim of Palo Duro Canyon and then hike across an open but rough plateau.  The climb was 600 feet, and because there was no maintained trail, our first challenge was gaining easy access to the plateau.  On the map the plateau was called Mesquite Park, but to this day Rick and I refer to it, simply, as the Mesa.

After a month of trial and error, climbing to the mesa from several approaches, from a gentle but lengthy ridge to the most direct assault, we finally concluded there was no easy or fast route to the western rim.  We finally settled on a faint horse trail that hadn't been used in decades, sections of which required us to scramble over loose dirt and rock.  After several trips, we learned our way and could reach the rim of the Palo Duro Canyon in just over an hour.

Rick hiking the "best" route to the Mesa

The second obstacle to finding the Camel was the uneven terrain on the Cita Canyon side of the Mesa.  The section we decided to explore was a mile long—but that was on a straight line.  What the topographical map didn't show was the number of points that jutted out and down into the canyon, and because we knew the Camel was located below the rim, we had to walk to the end of every promontory and back before going on to the next point.

After a month of searching for the Camel, hiking all day on Saturdays and half days during the week when we could sneak away from our jobs as teaching assistants, we seemed no closer to finding the Kneeling Camel, and we began to wonder if the old ranger had been right.  Maybe there was nothing left to see.  But we weren't ready to give up.  As a consolation prize we stumbled upon an amazing find, a time capsule in the form of an abandoned line camp, complete with a working windmill.

In my next installment I will pick up the story of the line camp, including a late-night encounter with coyotes, and our continuing search for the Kneeling Camel.

Line camp windmill

Trail Mix

In graduate school my good friend Rick Smith and I spent many a stolen afternoon and free Saturday hiking in the backcountry of Palo Duro Canyon (in the Texas Panhandle).  One trek, in particular, lasted a few hours longer than we had intended.  

Rick looking into Cita Canyon, 1984 (Note the canvas knapsack.)

After searching unsuccessfully for an elusive hoodoo formation called the Kneeling Camel, we rested in the shade of a mountain juniper, whereupon Rick produced two oranges from his canvas knapsack and handed one to me.  That amazingly sweet piece of fruit just might be the most delicious thing I have ever eaten.

Trail food always tastes better than anything eaten at home or in a restaurant.  Always.  In those days I would toss a Red Delicious apple and a pack of cheese and crackers in my daypack and strap a canteen over my shoulder and I was good to go.  He travels best who travels lightest, I must have thought.

Not anymore.  These days nothing less than a full meal and a couple of snacks will satisfy me on a day hike.  Even more significant is the kind of food I carry on the trail.  No more processed snacks full of hydrogenated oil.  No dry turkey sandwich even.  I am more likely to pack a slice of vegetable quiche and a bag of carrot sticks.  For a snack I might take a bag of homemade trail mix, and my choice of apple is more likely to be Macintosh or Pink Lady. 

Over the years my buddy Rick has maintained a simpler style, usually stowing no more than a CLIF bar or two in the same knapsack he carried decades ago.  It's a sign of restraint or unwavering friendship that he doesn't mock my trail cuisine, but I have caught his sly smile as I unpacked my Thai pasta salad and rice crackers.  The diagonal-cut cucumbers may have clashed with the desert air of the Davis Mountains, but I could not have imagined a tastier meal. 

How do I account for such a dramatic shift in my eating habits on the trail?  Part of the answer is surely a marked change in tastes and a stronger sense of health consciousness.  In middle age I monitor my fat and calorie intake much more than I did in my twenties.  But there's something else at work, I suspect.  I am more organized than I used to be, less spontaneous.  Gone are the days of raiding the pantry just before running out the back door.  

Just as gone are the days of hiking in blue jeans and work boots, of setting out without a hat or sunscreen.  No, these days a day hike is executed with the precision of a small vacation.  I wear the right weight of clothing and stow the right supplies, food, and amount of water the specific adventure calls for.

My typical hiking attire, 1984

That's not to say everything always goes according to plan.  Last summer my wife Susan and I set out on what we thought was morning hike down to the Gunnison River in Colorado.  Wanting to keep our packs light for the steep descent—1,800 feet in one mile—we took plenty of water but only light snacks, figuring we would return by lunchtime.  The trail map advised us to allow for three and a half hours down and back, but it took us closer to five.  

Cooling our feet in the Gunnison River

As we soaked our sore feet in the icy cold water of the Gunnison, Susan and I polished off the last handful of GORP—"good old raisins and peanuts" (not to mention M&Ms).  No doubt it was loaded with hydrogenated oil, but that trail mix was still delicious.  What I would have given for one of Rick's juicy navel oranges.

GORP