Texas
Texas is known for its rambling, flat expanses, but in the northern part of the state, in the middle of the panhandle, the ground falls away abruptly into a spectacularly colorful gorge system called Palo Duro Canyon. Nicknamed the Grand Canyon of Texas, Palo Duro Canyon is seventy miles long, eight hundred feet deep, and as wide as twenty miles across—the second-largest canyon system by area in North America.
From the air, the deep surface cracks and colorful layers appear in dramatic contrast to the flat patchwork of fields and farms across northern Texas. Palo Duro Canyon sits at the edge of the Caprock Escarpment, a line of cliffs that marks the geographical transition from the High Plains to the more rolling terrain of the lower Tablelands. In Texas, this escarpment—a tough layer of calcium carbonate that resists erosion—runs from the Oklahoma border for 200 miles south-southwest across the Texas Panhandle. In some places, the cliffs rise more than 1000 feet above the flat plains.
Southeast of Amarillo, the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River plunges over the edge of the Caprock Escarpment, into the Palo Duro Canyon. Powerful erosive forces generated by the falling river have carved the canyon within the last million years, producing dramatic geologic formations such as caves, towers, and bizarrely chiseled pillars.
The canyon itself may be only a million years old, but the rocks exposed there date back as far as 250 million years. These oldest layers accumulated in a shallow inland sea and the rocks preserve ripple marks (created in mud that turned to rock) and gypsum deposits known as Cloud Chief Gypsum. The rocks from the Triassic Period consist of bright, colorful layers of shale, siltstone, and sandstone deposited in swamps and streams during the early days of the dinosaurs. Fish and amphibian fossils are found in this band. The youngest layers, which form the cliffs and ledges at the top of the canyon, contain fossils of saber-toothed cats and North American rhinos collected between 20 and 2 million years ago, when grand pre–ice age mammals still roamed the continent.
The Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River has carved the extensive Palo Duro Canyon system in northern Texas within the past million years.
The Palo Duro Canyon cuts into the edge of the ecological and geological boundary between the High Plains and lower Tablelands of the Texas Panhandle.
With its steep walls and limited access points, Palo Duro Canyon is a natural fortress and evidence of human occupation dates as far back as 12,000 years, when North America’s first people were spreading across the continent. Archaeologists believe that ancient cultures gave way to the Apache, who were later displaced by the Comanche and Kiowa Tribes, who warred over the territory for centuries until they were both removed by the U.S. military in 1874.
Palo Duro Canyon lies southeast of Amarillo, in the middle of the Texas Panhandle. You might fly over it on your way to Amarillo, Texas.
