Day #2 - Monday June 3rd, 2019:
After spending the night in a rest area, I headed to Palo Duro Canyon just south of Amarillo Texas. This canyon is described as being the second largest canyon in the United States, and is 120 miles long and 880 feet deep.
Afterwards I headed north and finally joined up with the Trans America Trail (TAT) at the Colorado / New Mexico Border. The TAT makes a left turn off of a dirt road at the state line, and then follows pavement for a short distance before turning north again. From this point on, it's mostly dirt/gravel roads.
There were storms moving in to the area, and I missed most of them. I got caught in one though that had hail, and it was raining so hard that the road started flooding. It was also at a point where the road seemed to end at someone's house. As I started to turn around at their garage, I saw what I wasn't sure was a driveway, or the road. My GPS said it was the road, so I followed it.
I have a lot of video to go through, including the part that I just described. I'll be glad to get them edited and uploaded for you guys to see.
You encounter a lot of cattle on the open range.
I use a Samsung tablet for navigation (it has a built in GPS) and was following the TAT route on Google maps. I downloaded sections of the map to use offline in case I lost cell service. Unfortunately, when I lost service and reverted to the downloaded maps, it wasn't showing me the TAT route.
I had download
Gaia GPS and had the route loaded in that. I gave that a try and it worked flawlessly. I would highly recommend it!
While sorting out my navigation issue, I missed a turn, but didn't realize it until the Gaia GPS loaded. Even though the current route was going to intersect with the TAT, I turned around and backtracked to the turn that I missed. I'm glad I did because that lead me to Long Canyon Road. I had seen pics and video of this section of the TAT, and didn't want to miss it. I think it's the first really interesting section of the TAT.
I'm higher up than it seems. That white blur in the open part of the photo below is buildings.
I wouldn't want to meet a vehicle coming the other direction.
I traveled around
107 miles on the TAT from the Oklahoma border to Trinidad Colorado, but it took a few hours to cover it. I only passed 3 or 4 vehicles, and was was coming out of Trinidad.
I'm glad to finally be on the Trans America Trail.
Update: Here's a video highlight of the days trip: