The Palo Duro Canyon & a Non-Livestock Auction

Monday, 19.05.2014

The night in the very spacious room with a sitting area was quite sleepless for me. There are high lamps in front of the house, similar to floodlights, which shine directly on the height of our room and onto my bed because the curtains do not completely close.

After a forgotten shopping bag was located in a suitcase shop in San Marcos on Saturday after several phone calls, it will now be determined whether the store sends the bag to the last hotel before departure. They do it! We leave after "breakfast". There are exactly two muffins and seven jam packets and about the same amount of ketchup ready. Great. Muffins with ketchup today?! When asked, they finally come up with five slices of toast. It's 8:45. We are not late or early. And after we left, the breakfast room was immediately locked.

The old Indian is back in the lobby chairs, sleeping. His wife/daughter, who works at the reception, is excitedly making a phone call in her own language - probably private.

At TJ Maxx, I buy a new large suitcase and a smaller one that could serve as carry-on luggage or as a second piece of luggage. Now we are heading south, turning onto 217, which leads to Palo Duro Canyon, the second largest in the USA. The area here, at an altitude of around 1100 meters, is still very, very lonely. Fields or pastures as far as the eye can see. No hill "interrupts" the view to the horizon in all directions.

The canyon belongs to a very large State Park, formerly Indian territory, later a gigantic ranch (J.A. Ranch) with over 1 million acres and a six-digit number of cattle, bison, and longhorns. Some of the bison were donated to the Caprock Canyon after the end of the ranch, and we saw their descendants there yesterday.

There is only one road through the canyon, which also leads to several campsites in the northwestern corner. It is extremely hot, we have over 110°F (over 40°C), and there is a strong wind blowing.

However, we are already wondering why people want to spend their vacation down in the canyon, because the climate, the extreme dryness, is not something that makes humans feel really comfortable, and hiking is only possible in the very early morning hours to avoid running with 10 liters of drinking water in a backpack. The rest of the day, one has to try to survive the heat. I imagine it to be a bit tedious.

The colors of the canyon are beautiful: red, light, terracotta. There are green bushes. There are hoodoos and rugged rocks. Unfortunately, we only see a few wild turkeys and a few mule deer.

We drive through the park at a snail's pace, marveling at a few streams that apparently rise rapidly during heavy rains (when are they, I wonder?). One wouldn't want to camp here either.

In the park, there is an amphitheater where the musical "Texas" is played from May 31st until mid-August.

We leave the park in the afternoon and drive back to Amarillo. Downtown is completely deserted and empty. Only a few strange shops, no shopping street or mall - not even businessmen with their obligatory coffee cups or a Starbucks or something. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Since the travel guide says that livestock auctions take place in the auction hall on Manhattan Street on Tuesdays, we drive there to see how we can get there tomorrow, especially since there is also a café that supposedly has breakfast.

When we arrive there, they are already loading the cattle trailers and I find out that this is incorrectly stated in the travel guides everywhere, as the auctions have been on Mondays for 2 years now... So we only get to see cowboys driving the purchased cattle from a maze of separated areas into the corresponding trailers, some of which are extremely tight for the animals, and they are almost standing on top of each other.

We start a conversation with a man who only auctions off livestock here and today only bought one adult cow and a calf. He says that with luck, he can make $200 in profit from selling the meat and that he spent the day there, also having to cover the travel expenses. Since he was in the Army, is retired, and therefore surely does not depend on these earnings, it is probably more of a pastime than a living.

We go to the Westgate Mall, a dreary collection of a few second-rate department stores like Dillard’s and JC Penney. At Walmart, we stock up on groceries for tonight and the next few days.

So dinner in the hotel is served on the edge of the bed from plastic containers, and eventually the lights go out.