The Gardener Heads West

I don’t get out of Fayette County too often, much less the Great State of Texas. I used to be able to count the number of times I crossed the state line with my fingers. I’m going to have to start using toes now.

Janessa’s sister and her husband live part-time in Ft. Collins, Colorado, and they’ve been tagging us to visit for a while. We finally took the big trip this week. I’m writing this Wednesday morning as Janessa drives past the Spanish Peaks on Interstate 25 south of Pueblo. It really is beautiful out here. We left La Grange around 10 a.m. yesterday. We wanted to leave earlier in the morning. But I needed to put a bale of hay out for my cattle, and of course, my tractor decided to have a dead battery and a flat tire. It seems to know when I have plans. We ate lunch at Opie’s Barbecue in Spicewood. At the time, I wondered if we should wait for Cooper’s in Llano. I’m glad we didn’t. We ordered brisket and jalapeno sausage. It wasn’t the best I’ve ever had, but it was pretty dang close. If you stop there, get the tater tot casserole!

I love a good road trip through the Hill Country, especially when you add a few Robert Earl Keen songs to the playlist. We took Hwy. 71 to Brady and then took Hwy. 87. That was about as far as I have ever been in that part of the state. From there, it was all new country for me. We saw a road sign for a town named Eden. As the town approached, we wondered what kind of paradise might be in store. The joke was on us, though. About the shiniest thing in that city was the razor wire around the “detention center” in the middle of town. From there we cut through that spot on the map that’s not quite West Texas, the Panhandle or Edwards Plateau. The hills turned into an undulating plain. I saw more cropland through there. We passed through Ballinger, which seemed like a nice town to stop and visit. But we were on a mission. My sister-in-law begged us to drive straight through without stopping for the night. Google said the trip was 16-something hours from La Grange. It’s doable, but we wanted to drive in the daylight and enjoy the scenery.

I always wanted to see the Palo Duro Canyon, but I never had a chance until now. Wow, it did not disappoint. From Ballinger we drove through Sweetwater, Snyder and Post before hopping up the Caprock Escarpment and onto the Llano Estacado. I tried to imagine the old tall-grass prairie that once covered this landscape. Francisco Coronado got his army lost up there in 1541 looking for gold. He described the landscape as having “no more landmarks than if we had been swallowed up by the sea ... there was not a stone, nor bit of rising ground, nor a tree, nor a shrub, nor anything to go by.”

It was too late in the day for us to set up camp at Palo Duro State Park. We opted instead to drive through the canyon and then get a room in Amarillo.

We drove for miles and miles north on SH 207.

Today, the landscape is dotted with irrigated circles of cropland. But a few fields of open prairie remain.

And then the bottom fell out from underneath us. The highway dropped into Tule Canyon, the site of Lake Mackenzie. The lake gets its name from U.S. Army Col. Ranald S. Mackenzie, who at this spot in 1874 slaughtered a herd of over 1,000 horses that belonged to some Indians he was trying to subdue.

We rose out of this little canyon and we’re once again upon the Llano Estacado. Then we drove for many more miles before the highway dropped again.

Words cannot describe it. Magnificent? Sure.

We stopped at a place where the shoulder was wide enough to park. We walked around, taking it all in. A young couple drove by in a pickup.

It was the only vehicle we saw for several hours. The girl’s head was sticking out of the window, with her jaw dropped and eyes wide open - just like us.

I hope we get a chance to camp at the park on our way back home.