Day 5 April 9, 2015
Today, we drove over to Palo Duro Canyon, to some of their
trails. As we traveled over there, there was slight
haze in the sky. But as we reached the
floor of the canyon, the haze had evaporated.
We had two trails that we wanted to do.
Our first trail ran into our second trail at 3 miles. Since we started fairly early, the sun was
coming from our backs and put a great light on the red rocks and the other
cliff faces. The formations from erosion
were very pretty. We made a plan for me
to walk with Jan the first 3 miles then I would go from there to the “Lighthouse”
formation and then I would do a return walk on the trail back to the Lighthouse
trailhead. While we hiked out, no one else
on the trail. We agreed that this trail
is in the top 10 of our hikes. I’ll have
to say that my hike back to the Lighthouse trailhead was not anywhere near as
nice as the trail out. It was really a
crowded trail on my way in. But before I
turned back toward the trailhead I went on to the Lighthouse. It was fun looking at it as I hiked along
toward it. At the base of the climb up
was a bike stand for the cyclist that rode the trail. From there it was a vertical climb to the
Lighthouse. On this trail I met my first
people of the day as they did a controlled slide back down to the trail. On the platform that formed the base of
Lighthouse I saw a small group of folks.
Two of group were from Sweden and this was their first hike in
Texas. They seemed to be impressed as we
looked out over the canyon. As I proceeded
back to the trailhead, I met group after group of hikers on their way out to
the formation. At one point, I met 3 cyclists
on their mountain bikes going out the trail.
This was a perfect trail for cyclist.
When Jan and I met at the trailhead we had lunch and she talked me into
another trail before we came back out of the canyon today. The next little trail was a good way to
settle our lunch. Nice but not
spectacular. We were spoiled this
morning.
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