Episode #12: Palo Duro Hike

-

 It is May 2004 and I am still working at Redi Mix Concrete and it is a common practice for material vendors to take customers out for entertainment and customer relations building. It is the same practice for our sales reps and our customers. Often times, that would consist of something as simple as lunch or as extravagant as a hunting or fishing trip out of state. Most of the time the most frequent activity was taking a customer to golf. My buddy Tom, who was my immediate supervisor for a few years and now these days I am a peer level Vice President with differing operational duties and responsibilities. Tom was responsible for purchasing many of the raw materials we buy did not hunt, fish or play golf. This presented a challenge to a vendor that wanted to take him out on a customer outing.

One day one of our sales rep Scott and his boss, Stan came to Tom's Lewisville office to identify an activity that he would want to do. Long story short, they somehow agree on a hike at the Palo Duro Canyon in the Texas panhandle. They both agreed this was a first for them but they would be up for it. Tom calls me later that day and tells me to get my hiking gear ready and told me I was invited to come along. 

This was a great opportunity for me as I was in training for a hike up the highest mountain in the continental United States just a few months from now in August. I will post about my adventure up Mt. Whitney in a future post. A few days later the four of us head out to Palo Duro Canyon in Tom's 4 door F250 pick up pulling his 5th trailer so we can stay in the park grounds. The first day we arrive, it is getting late in the day so all we do is get the RV set up and ready for the stay and then we drive into town for supper.

The next morning after a quick bite of breakfast, we head out on the first day of hiking. It is a beautiful place especially at sunrise and sunset. I took this picture after I asked the rest of the guys to stand in front of this iconic spire. It is so big it took me longer than I thought to get to a place I could capture the picture I wanted. Thus the reason you really cannot identify those in the picture. I love this picture and it singularly identifies where we are.


Here is another pic that is much closer but doesn't capture the entire monument that I was looking for.


As you can tell, I am the runt of the group. Each of these guys stand 6'4" or more. But I was able to keep up with these giant fellas pretty well.


On day one, Scott did not pace himself very well regarding his water consumption and ran out early in the day. We finally found him some water late in the afternoon at a hose faucet in a remote parking lot and he gladly refilled his water bottle. It was pretty warm that day and with the elevation of the canyon at the rim is 3500' above sea level with the deepest part of the canyon of 800' so there was a little altitude to deal with since we live at around 600' elevation. The Palo Duro (which is Spanish for Hard Wood) is 20 miles wide and 120 miles long. We hiked and saw as much as we could for two full days but there is much more to see, but we did catch some of the more popular sites in the canyon.


As can be seen in the first pictures as well as this one, the heavy deposits of red sandstone and white gypsum. 

One last caveat about the canyon to share was Indiana Jones' epic journey in the search of the holy grail in the movie "The Last Crusade" was filmed in part here in the Palo Duro.




 Tips on how to search for previous or missed posts of my blog-




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Episode #23: A Good Wife Is A Gracious Gift From God ... Proverbs 19:14

-
Image
This post won't mean as much to those who do not know Carol Ann, but those that do know her, I know you love her and this is my story about a young teenaged girl that captured my heart so many decades ago. I know my family will enjoy this episode and the look back. Carol Ann defines the term love at first sight for me. She was 16 years old in this picture and we met a year later when we were both seniors attending different high schools. We met one cool January afternoon in 1975 while making "the drag" you know, the practice of driving through town to the Safeway parking lot then back through town to the Sonic drive-in then repeat, repeat to ad nauseam. I had a couple of buddies riding with me and we would honk and wave at the town girls, (remember, I was a 17 year old boy who lived in a small very and rural community about 15 miles away).  She was riding around with one of her friends and when they waved back that was all I needed to turn around and follow. We caught up ...
Read more

Episode#49: Watch The Babies As They Grow Up

-
Image
  The main objective for creating this blog in the first place was to document stories of my life that my children may have forgotten or maybe never knew and for their children and their children's children. I never knew my great-grandparents and have only met met one of them, my great grandmother who died when I was 13 years old and I knew little to nothing about her. I did not want this to be the case for my downline. Among the travels and adventures I have shared here in the previous 48 stories of this blog, I have not included very many stories of my childhood yet, however I did dedicate a couple of posts about when we moved to the country when I was a kid and when I met Carol Ann in high school. For some time I thought it would be fun for me and entertaining for them to see a pictorial account of me and Carol Ann as we grew up. So for that purpose, I have found as many school pictures that I can find and have matched them up to show what each of us looked like as the years pas...
Read more

Episode #46: Ruth Evelyn Wilson Black My Grandma

-
Image
This story is more for historical purposes for those of my family, particularly for my sons and grandkids but is a story of my childhood and family. For story context, Grandma Black was born almost 113 years ago, on June 26,1912. She was born a couple of months after the Titanic left England then two days later strike an iceberg and sank just two and a half hours later. In birth order of her grandchildren, I was the sixth. Her oldest son had two daughters older than me, Sherri and Brenda. Her younger son had a son named Kenny, and my mother had two children before me, Mike and Patty. Grandma was 45 years old when I was born in August 1957. Her father, Fred Walter Wilson was born in 1881 and died in 1949 at the age of 68. Her mother, Nancy Jane Monroe Wilson was born in 1880 and died in 1970 when she was 90 years old. I do have a few memories of my great grandmother but I was only 13 years old when she died and we did not see her very often when we went to OKC. The photo below is the ea...
Read more