Palo Duro Canyon to be exact!
Ah, yes. Palo Duro Canyon. A beautiful place. Click the thumbnails for larger view.
What with the rocks and all. You know.
My brother and I decided to hike today. We decided to hike a popular trail known as the Lighthouse Trail. We quickly left the trail in defiance of every sign that says "Please don't leave the trails; we don't want to search for your decaying bodies. Come on, man." I hate you, signs. I roam free. You can't tie me down. I don't care if you say I have to carry a minimum of 1 gallon of water with me. I have 16 oz. of it. Jerk.
So, off we wandered.
Hey, some caves and stuff.We decided to check these cavey things out. They sucked.
A hole with a beer can. Whoop-de-doo.
A tiny bottomless pit. Too small to fall into. Not very perilous.Well, this was lame. But oh wait, look at the view:
Okay. You got me. Pretty awesome, little faux cave.Maybe we should join back up to the Lighthouse trail at some point before it ends. What's this? A Plaque?
Huh.Well, that's a pretty famous landmark. We gotta see it even though something like 7554324 people crowd there every year. Besides, we're here early. No one else will be there. Good photo op, right?
A good bit more hiking and climbing yields:
Oh, we are SO going up there.More hiking and climbing. Like, if this were a video game there would be a loading screen or a cut scene here or something and then:
My brother staring at the large, phallic hoodoo.Hey, this is awesome! I'm surrounded by huge, sheer cliffs! Oh boy!
My brother, seemingly confused about EVERYTHING IN THE WORLD.So hey, this has been awesome, but everyone comes to this part, right? It's only a few miles from the road, after all. There's no trail that continues farther. There is only treacherous areas of rocks, cliffs, pointy desert death plants, etc.
Screw it, on we go. For several miles. Into uncharted, untamed wilderness that is remote enough that there's not one piece of litter, or one footprint of any kind, or one bit of name-scratched-into-rock graffiti. It wasn't the optimum terrain to stop and pull out your iPhone for a pic, but I took some anyway.
We soon came to a bunch of boulders perched atop their own special pedestals. I thought this one looked like a whale:
Thar she blows!We climbed around on these before moving on.
Hey, let's climb up there.After a bit of treacherous climbing on eroded rock that crumbled under your feet, we came to an area with large, grey boulders all together in a disjointed fashion. They were all cracked apart with deep chasms between.
Hey, let's walk on these.
Oh boy!In this area, the tough, grey rock resisted erosion while the sandstone and shale under it was being eaten like cheesecake in Rosie O'Donnel's house.
Uh... the rock I'm standing on sounds hollow when I tap on it. Really hollow. Not cool.
Beware of sudden dropoffs.Well, that was kind of frightening after my brother tapped his foot on the ground and it sounded
very hollow. So hollow that the tap echoed underneath. So we scurried on by.
Hmm. Seems to be tough going in some of these places. Should we be here? Like, seriously, what are we doing?Quite a bit of hiking later, we met Awesomerock. Awesomerock guards the entrance to Awesomeland, which is the end of the creekbed we were now in, having made our way into the bottom of the canyon.
"What's up guys. "Awesomeland:
"Am I just trippin' balls or is this giant rock in our way?"We decided that maybe climbing one of the side walls would be the plan now.
Piece of cake.Now, a cell phone camera has a tiny lens. It is not good at portraying depth of field without a very obvious size reference being in the frame. This wall we were climbing was very high and very,
very crumbly.
For reference, this is like 80 feet almost straight down and we were standing on a small slope of very loose rocks. Those rocks in the river bed down there are massive.I got a picture of my brother on the little slope we were on, to show what it was like. I waited until we were above a somewhat less-fatal dropoff, though.
Hahaha! I'm smiling because I'm still alive!Being an adventurous and extremely masculine man, I had to climb higher:
The wind is blowing my hair. Makes me look like I have an afro. Hell yeah. The view from up high is pretty damned nice, if only because you're hanging over a fatal edge every moment.
This was cool and all but I wasn't going to climb all the way over. It was going to take us hours to get back to the car as it was. We started the long, long journey back, albeit on a slightly different path.
Alex noticed something.
"I notice something in the general direction I'm pointing." Wow, what a rare find!
"Painted" rock. 
Really old tire from when they were first making the state park. 
Reeeeally old horse ties from the 1800s probably. These things are lame compared to cliffs. Your noticing skills suck, man. I guess that's our cue to go home.
All in all, it was an amazing adventure, though. And I am an amazing man. Tougher than the 250-million year-old rock. Rugged and manly. Awesome.
Hell Yeah. 
