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