Little did I know, the Grand Canyon of Texas lies just outside the town of Amarillo. The best word to describe this geologic feature is surprising. As you know – assuming you read the previous post – the Texas panhandle looks something like this:
One mile later, we were looking down on this:
Need I say more?
Ok, I will say more: Wow.
Katy and I hiking around in the canyon.
Katy holds up a tree.
At the visitor's center, we learned a few interesting things about the canyon. Most importantly, we found an answer to our chief question: how did this canyon get here? We learned that, as we had suspected, it was a product of years of gradual wearing-away by a river - the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River, to be exact. The canyon was made of layers of rock - the colors so distinctive it has me wishing I had studied more geology...I forgot their names already - the lowest layers were over 200 million years old, while the topmost layers were "only" 2 to 5 million years old. Katy and I pondered what the Native Americans and later the white settlers must have thought, stumbling upon this cavern of red and white rocks in the middle of the flat grasslands. I suppose it could have been anything from "Beautiful!" to "ah, shade at last" to "Buffalo!" to "Now how are we going to get the wagon around THIS?"
Optical illusion.
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