High Plains drifting

Buffalo statue at the center of WTAMU campus

The mountains really disappeared at La Junta. Until then, Pikes Peak, the Sangre de Cristo and the Spanish Peaks defined the western horizon, even on a hazy morning. Along the grasslands south of the town, once the last of the horse paddocks trail away, have no horizon but the flat land running alongside the car.

A respite from the flatness arrived quickly. Comanche National Grasslands is divided among several parcels, and the northernmost winds through a series of low hills, benchlands and mesa, all covered in heart pines and other trees. The sweet smell of pine blooms drifted through the window.

The Purgatoire River gurgled beneath a low bridge, the Picketwire Canyon and its dinosaur trackway out among the mesas. The landscape could not compete with the Central Rockies, but it felt regal nonetheless.

1920s oil derrick, PPHM

The road swung around these mesas, climbing and winding, then nothing. It crested on a high plain, ending at a federal highway. The land flattened to every horizon except for grain bins. In the town of Pritchett, three grain towers loomed over a crumbling business district (one large building leaned as if pushed by the wind), although the houses were kept up.

Springfield was a little larger and beset by legions of trucks hauling goods across these backroads. The passing game began, with me skipping past more than a dozen semis before the Colorado-Oklahoma line. Green still clung to the tough grasses here. It felt temporary, as if the burnt-out landscape of the dry season could leech away the green at any second.  Wildflowers bloomed cautiously near the road.

The mesas returned after the state line dropped into the Oklahoma Panhandle, even as all trace of green vanished. Less than 30,000 people live in the three Panhandle counties, where settlers once ripped up native grasses and set off the 1930s Dust Bowl (the national grasslands hold the local soils in place now).

The region seemed parched. The riverbeds ran dry, even the Cimarron and its tributary the Beaver. Only Boise City qualifies as more than a crossroads this far west in the Oklahoma Panhandle, but even it blinked by as the highway rumbled into Texas. In just 40-some miles, this little neck of Oklahoma falls into the rearview mirror. I want to come back at some point, since the state's high point, Black Mesa, sits on the border with Colorado. 

Charles Goodnight

The heat and humidity of the Texas Panhandle immediately grasp newcomers, but before either digs in, the wind comes along. That the region is a growing producer of wind energy does not surprise, since the gusts pushed my car along the road from the time I turned south.

At Dumas, the highway widened to four lanes all the way to Amarillo. North of town the Wonderland amusement park sat idle due to the pandemic. I imagined it on a day in any other summer, with cars lined up to enter and people out the adjoining city park.

The highway turns into one of the main streets in downtown Amarillo, passing through its skyline. Along with a few skyscrapers – the FirstBank Southwest runs close to 400 feet, the city has many older mid-rise towers. But there weren’t a lot of public spaces, parks or otherwise.  

Canyon sits 15 minutes south of Amarillo, not really a suburb but a college town of 15,000 and its own established character. Restaurants, soda shops and small businesses keep the square around the Randall County Courthouse drew crowds despite the pandemic. I ducked into Burrowing Owl Books and found a book of cowboy stories by famed western artist Charlie Russell.  

My choice of hotel seemed too obvious. I stayed at a freshly renovated Buffalo Inn, a motor court across the street from West Texas A&M University. They even rolled out the old table and replaced it with a new, comfortable chair. It made for a nice break from the chain hotels sprouting along Canyon’s corridors toward the interstate.

Sitting in a restaurant still doesn’t feel quite right. I grabbed some food from Braum’s, as well as some snacks for the room. Other local snacks were also required. I drove to western Amarillo to get some carryout beer from Pondaseta Brewing, one of Amarillo’s handful of craft brewers (the city also has a distillery).

Before I went anywhere, I needed a stretch of the legs, which John Stiff Community Park provided. The park has a paved loop around a lake with flocks of waterfowl drifting in the shallows. Not that they needed help drifting – a swift prairie wind blew and the sun was relentless, so I was glad the route wasn’t long.

Pondaseta was packed due to reopening social-distance regulations, and I grabbed two four-packs of IPA before heading south again. Normally I might have visited for a pint, but a line formed for taproom seats. As I walked out, the wind pushed the door shut so fast I feared I might have lost my fingers if I reacted slower.

Sunset arrived and the campus across the street demanded exploration. The air cooled and the wind continued to gush, making for comfortable twilight wandering through WTAMU campus. Few people milled about. Flowers bloomed. Screaming kids ran around the pedestrian mall while their mothers talked. A clocktower light the sky as the red and orange exited the clouds and night took hold.

A buffalo statue stood in a colonnade between academic buildings. WTAMU’s sports teams were the Buffalos, so it made sense. Closer I saw the statue showed bull bison nuzzling a newborn calf. A fountain ringed by flower beds protected the statue from anyone climbing on it.

The WTAMU campus hosts the Panhandle Plains History Museum, which covers every corner of Panhandle history from exploratory oil maps to billions of years of prehistory. Major fossil beds have been found across the region, from bone fragments to prehistoric amphibians the size of crocodiles to sabretooth cats and mammoths. The museum boasts a gallery from western artist Harold Bugbee, who served as curator from 1951-63. His artist studio is recreated next to the gallery. Other galleries display art brought to the Panhandle by migrating families, including one Italian piece that dates back to 1511.

Harold Bugbee studio recreation

Panhandle fossil find, one of many

A basement exhibit felt like what the museum might have offered 50 years ago. Its glass cases housed decades-old dioramas, arrowheads, more fossils and taxidermied speciments of living and extinct regional species, including the last wolf killed in the Panhandle more than a century.The High Plains had made their mark as a place ripe for exploration, even just a short walk from the hotel.

Panhandle sunrise east of Canyon