Trip to Amarillo and Palo Duro Canyon.

My pediatrics rotation has recently come to an end and with summer starting, that means vacation! At Baylor we usually get the last two weeks of June off for vacation before we start back after the 4th of July. This year, Kristi and I took a week to hit the road to go back to Borger and Amarillo to see some old friends and family. We managed to find a place to stay with the newly graduated Dr. Wesley Nickens, lol, still getting used to that. The trip up wasn't bad, and we decided to spend a night in Dallas on the way up to see Lucy Rochetti, a good friend of mine from A&M. We hit the town on the night and made church on Sunday morning before finishing the trip to Amarillo.

One of the big things was to see Dustin and Lindsey in Borger as they were currently in from North Dakota for a month. Dustin had his Step 1 exam to take later that week and of course Lindsey is currently expecting a baby girl come late September, so that was exciting to get to see them. Also, Kristi had been working on a really sweet baby blanket that was hand knitted, so it was fun to be able to give that to them in person. We also got to have some good ol' Lorene's Mexican food, although I'm not too sure what K thought about it.

The next day, we made plans to hit up Palo Duro canyon with a day of hiking and a night of Texas the musical drama. The famous landmark of Palo Duro is the well known and widely photographed "Lighthouse" landform which involves a 6 mile round trip hike to get to. Both Wes and I have been out to it before as well as the play, but I thought it would be great if Kristi could experience it too while we were in Amarillo. We started the hike early in the morning and were able to take quite a few pictures while out there.


This was fairly close to the start of the hike, a part of what's named Capitol Peak.


This was also pretty early on in the hike, you can see how dry the area is as there has been very little rain for a long time.


Really interesting sandstone embankment, filled with little holes and caves on the side.



You can really see the canyon's famous "Spanish Skirts" on the side of this embankments from all the different sedimentary layers in the canyon's walls.


Eventually along the hike you can see the lighthouse jutting up in the distance.


We had just finished a pretty demanding climb up the canyon wall after reaching this point, thankfully some rudimentary steps had been made to help hikers out along this part of the trail.


We finally make it to the lighthouse and took a little break on the "tabletop" plateau that bridged it's main promontory to the clifface on the opposite side. From here it had a good ranged view to a lot of the canyon we just hiked through.




Also nearby was a little overhanging stone which gave a good vantage point for pictures.














And of course some people wanted to clown around with some pictures as well. ;-)





Overall it was a fun hike and good to see the canyon again, although by midday it was extremely hot and the three of us was exhausted and probably borderline dehydrated despite bringing plenty of water out there. After getting cleaned up, we went back for the musical which had added a few things since the previous times I've seen it, but overall was kind of disappointing since they cancelled the big closing fireworks show due to the extreme drought conditions and the burn ban, but overall it was still worth it. After a few more days of rest and relaxation we eventually made our way back to Lorena and Houston respectively, but it was a good getaway, and fun as always to see old friends.