Palo Duro Canyon State Park quietly reached a milestone on Nov. 26. It was 70 years ago this year that the nearly 11/2-mile rim-to-bottom road was opened to great fanfare and hopes. As the politicians cut the ribbon allowing public access to the “Grand Canyon of Texas” there was no guarantee that the park would survive the Great Depression.
“The road is symbolic of what a tremendous accomplishment the park is,” says Dr. Peter Petersen, professor emeritus of history at West Texas A&M University in Canyon. “It is amazing how close [the park] came to not happening. Its fate hung by a thread on more than one occasion.”
As visitors stand on the rim of the canyon at the park’s headquarters, it is as if they are standing on the edge of the Earth. Of course, the 600- to 800-foot walls of orange, red, lavender, gray, white, brown, and yellow rocks have changed considerably since Coronado was the first white tourist to see this magnificent sight in 1541.
For approximately 1,200 years, Native Americans used the canyon as a camp while they hunted the buffalo that wandered the plains. The Indians’ supremacy of the Panhandle came to an end when the U.S. Army attacked their village in September 1874 and destroyed most of their supplies and horses.
Two years later, Charles Goodnight led a herd of cattle into the canyon to start the first ranch in the Panhandle. The trail he took into Palo Duro Canyon was so narrow that the wagon had to be disassembled and lowered with ropes. “Nobody really knows which trail Goodnight used,” says Hi Newby, manager of the 16,000-acre state park, “but the old Indian trail into the canyon is 12 to 15 miles south of the state park on private land.” Goodnight had sold his interest in the canyon by 1890 as farmers began moving into the area.
According to Petersen in his 1979 essay, “A Park for the Panhandle” published in The Story of Palo Duro Canyon (edited by Duane Guy, Texas Tech University Press) the effort to create a park around the canyon began in 1906 with a local petition asking for the establishment of a national park in the upper end of the 150-mile canyon.
It wasn’t until 1924 when the state Legislature organized the first Texas Parks Board that work began to establish a park at the site. By the early 1930s, the canyon was opened to excursions, and the landowner offered to sell the state 15,000 acres. With the competition for state funds from the park in Big Bend, where land prices were pennies an acre compared to $10 to $25 on the Staked Plains, Palo Duro Canyon was losing the struggle for funding.
Like the cavalry, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps came to the rescue of the park in 1933. The federal program put unemployed men to work on public projects around the country. The first companies arrived in July, and by Nov. 26, 1933, they had hand-built the road that is still used today. “The goal wasn’t the road,” Petersen says. “The goal was the work.”
The canyon officially became a state park on July 4, 1934, but it only included 120 lien-free acres. Land ownership issues continued to plague the park. In 1946, there were rumors of the foreclosure on the loan. A year later new financing was found. As the postwar economy began to pick up so did gate receipts. The popularity of the park paid off the mortgage by 1966, more than 20 years early.
Signs of the CCC’s work are everywhere in the park, from the Coronado Lodge visitor center to the bridges over the streams. “In many ways Palo Duro Canyon stands as one of the greatest achievements of the CCC in Texas,” Petersen says.
Palo Duro Canyon is about 25 miles south of Amarillo off I-27. The park is open daily from 8am to 10pm. Park ranger Newby says the three CCC-built cabins on the rim of the canyon have recently been remodeled and are some of the nicest rooms in the state park system. The park is also the site of the outdoor musical Texas, which runs June through August. For more information, call the park at 806/488-2227. For camping or cabin reservations call 389-8900 or go to www.tpwd.state.tx.us.
651st in a series. Day Trips, Vol. 2, a book of Day Trips 101-200, is available for $8.95, plus $3.05 for shipping, handling, and tax. Mail to: Day Trips, PO Box 33284, South Austin, TX 78704.
This article appears in November 28 • 2003.
