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