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.