Camping and Hiking at Palo Duro Canyon - Photo Journal (1)

After about 6 hour on the road, we arrived at the Palo Duro Canyon State Park around 3:30 pm. Drove along the road into canyon, we reached our camp site Hackberry Camp site. Our site was site #1, right by the road. Fortunately the traffic was pretty light in the park and there was no noise issue

It took a us ~ 15 minutes to set up tents. We were ready to hike on the most famous trail at the park - light house trail

The trail is at the bottom of the canyon. The main scenery is rock formation. Our speed was about the speed of walking on flat road

Rocks of various shape and colors are on all sides of the trail - close and far

Some flavor of Bryce Canyon Hoodoo and Yellow Stone Artist Point?

The last portion of the trail to the "light house rock" is not sanctioned, and pretty hard to hike/climb. We arrived at Light House Rock formation ~ 5pm

Just in time to see the golden lights shinning on the light house rock from the setting Sun

I climbed to a small peak by the light house rock

The Sun was setting

It got dark really quickly. We were prepared for hiking in the dark and cold. We had flash lights, headlights and brought sweaters or heavy jackets with us, The first "star" we saw was actually the planet Venus. We were the last group off the trail to return to the parking lot - in fact park ranger came to check as we were leaving!
We had noodles, sausages, chickens, Croissant, vegetable and fruit for dinner. After the meal, we turned off the camp lights to watch the beautiful starry sky. The Milky Way was clearly overhead. Walking around the camp site allowed us to see the stars from different angles and viewpoints. At some locations, we could clearly see the city light from Amarillo - and of course we did not see many stars in that direction due to light pollution. At our tents, it was dark, cold, quiet and mystically beautiful!