Palo Duro Canyon State Park

Why is Palo Duro not a National Park?  When applying for National Park status someone apparently sent black and white photos for the presentation rather than color photos (or so the story goes) and Congress wasn't too impressed.  That's okay.  Texas is good with that.  Palo Duro is all ours!

You can scroll down to our earlier post (that would be about 150 posts ago...) to "The Very First Thanksgiving was in ... Texas!"  I suppose that's the beginning of white men in Palo Duro.  The Spanish didn't manage a very good foothold in Texas back in the 1500's, so Palo Duro remained in the hands of the American Indians - Commanche, Apache, and Kiowa - for several hundred years more.

The first thing we see though certainly harken back to the Spaniards:  Longhorn cattle.

Isn't he a magnificent brindle?

And yes, we do still brand out cattle in Texas.  Branding is the only sure way of marking one's stock.  In the wild west, modifying those brands was one of the ways cattle rustlers survived, and they came up with some pretty cool over-branding.



We love camping in the canyon. 

This is a "Texas" tent - intended for maximum breeze capturing.  See how huge that window is?  There's a rain cap that goes with this tent and covers those windows - but we didn't have to use it this night and so, with a very bright, full moon, we watched the stars as we drifted off to sleep.

When we woke up in the morning, standing right outside the window was a deer:

We usually see turkey and certainly racoons.  We didn't see them this time, but one of the other campers said that during the night she had a raccoon trying to work the zipper on her tent...