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.