All Ranch Roads Lead to Home 
Letter From the High Plains
Land That I Love
It took long enough, but the boundaries of the spectacular—and spectacularly small—Palo Duro Canyon State Park have finally been expanded. More, please.
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For decades the huge bulk of Palo Duro Canyon remained in the hands of a few ranching families (one of Texas’ signature features, the butte known as the Lighthouse, was not in the original park but got added in the sixties). Then, in the seventies, the TPWD purchased a couple of private ranches 45 miles south of Palo Duro to get hold of another vivid pair of canyons. Caprock Canyons State Park, totaling just under 14,000 acres, was also within the Red River watershed, and some of us immediately saw the possibility for something big: Couldn’t we fill in that lost world of canyons along the 45 miles between the two parks and create the National Park of the Plains that never was?
Fifteen or so years ago, in Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys Into the Heart of the Southern Plains, I suggested a federal solution. Having unearthed the story of the failed national park at Palo Duro while researching the book, I argued that the NPS, which was publicly lamenting its lack of Great Plains parks and casting about for new possibilities for plains wilderness preservation, ought to reopen its half-century-old files on the Palo Duro Canyon system. Apparently I was almost the only person in the state who thought so. A TPWD official told me that, frankly, any proposal combining the words “Texas,” “wilderness,” and “Washington” in the same sentence was worse than a nonstarter: It might get you excommunicated as a Texan.
Okay, so now I see the light. This is how you do it—piecemeal and by the state of Texas, which no one has ever accused of having a socialist bone in its body. By quietly having a standing offer ready, a state department long criticized for its reluctance to add public lands has pulled off a coup. The Harrell Ranch and Cañoncita additions have created the possibility for a true wilderness area on the Texas plains. The transfer features a continuing grazing lease for the Harrells, so the riparian lands, which are pretty cowed up, will probably remain so, but the upland areas are in good shape. Despite a bit of ancestral infamy for the Harrells, a couple of whom knowingly killed the last Plains buffalo wolf in the Panhandle, the family has done reasonably well by the canyon. They took good care of the historic site of the 1874 Battle of Palo Duro Canyon, which, absurdly, had never been part of the park. That site marked the end of Indian life on the Southern Plains just as finally as the Little Bighorn site did on the Northern Plains (the latter, by the way, is a national monument).
Almost as soon as I heard about these new acquisitions, I called Doug Huggins to inquire if I might see them for myself. Palo Duro Canyon isn’t just Georgia O’Keeffe’s spiritual home. It’s close to being mine too, and twenty years after I’d had to trespass to experience it, I thought things might be looking up for having a new kind of relationship with this bright, bold country. Although the new Palo Duro additions are still closed to the public while the park develops a trail network and backcountry campsites, Doug kindly offered to give me a tour. Between big snowstorms this past January, my Alaskan malamute, Chaco, and I drove over from Santa Fe, hoping to see something like my old pet vision of a national park in the Panhandle.
We spent our first afternoon exploring the Cañoncita addition by pickup. Not only does it add more than two thousand acres along the southwest side of the park, but it includes the Gilvin family homesite, a stunning location on the lip of the canyon. Though it’s considerably smaller than the Harrell addition, Cañoncita is nonetheless a critical piece, draping from the canyon rim down across the mouth of the beautiful side gorge of North Cita Canyon. Until hiking trails go in to connect the original park with the Harrell Ranch acquisition, Cañoncita provides the only route into the new parts of the park.
After a night in the nearby town of Canyon, I joined Doug and his natural resources manager, Matthew Trujillo, on a spectacular winter morning for the real treat, a return to my illegal 1987 campsite. We were just a few feet from the gurgling Red River, in the very location where Comanches, Kiowas, and Cheyennes made the last grand Plains Indian encampment in Texas history that fateful September in 1874. By four-wheeler and foot, we spent most of the day traversing the Harrell Ranch acquisition, working our way into, and then back out of, deepest Palo Duro. In many respects the park will be completely remade by the addition of these lands. Finally, it will begin to seem wild, full of bobcats and turkeys slipping away through the mesquite and grama grass, and bands of mule deer bucks strung out in silhouette across the mesa tops, and slate-headed bald eagles looping in the blue above, and behind it all the amazing lavender, saffron, chocolate, and brick-red badlands known as the Spanish Skirts providing a backdrop unlike anywhere else on earth.
Maybe, as Justice Douglas joked, a park really is socialism, but if so, it looks awfully good on Palo Duro. The experience of being down in the canyon’s core, with its riot of colors and its bountiful wildlife, was a reminder that outside of Big Bend, there is just no other big Western setting in Texas like this. The Harrell Ranch and Cañoncita additions are a start, but continuing to expand the park presence here in the Panhandle should be central to our vision of place. If the state wanted to, it could keep up the piecemeal process, adding more and more land, especially down the western watershed of Palo Duro. There lies the primary wilderness canyon country of the Texas Panhandle—marvels like the Mexican Creek and Barrel Creek canyons; or Indian Creek Canyon, which the Nature Conservancy has been trying for years to acquire; or the stunner of the High Plains, Tule Canyon, mistaken by General Randolph Marcy during his 1852 expedition as the source of the headwaters of the Red River. The Narrows of Tule Canyon is a Great Plains version of Yosemite, and in any public-spirited society it would belong to the people of Texas.
Like Harrell Ranch and Cañoncita, all this country could be ours and damn well ought to be. The plains may be on their way to becoming a sacrifice area of hog and wind farms, but for some of us there will always be the need to develop a tie with the real world underfoot—those Contact moments with sky, earth, and sun. Soon, for the first time in our time, there will be country enough for an authentic wilderness experience in the Panhandle, a stunning, unfenced expanse of Western canyon lands for channeling our inner bonobo, or at least our inner Roy Bedichek.
Imagine doing that in Texas … and not getting arrested.
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