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Panhandle: Amarillo to Canyon to Tulia to Caprock Canyons State Park to Turkey to Palo Duro Canyon to Amarillo.

Article Excerpt
THIS IS THE BIGGEST sky you will ever see. Twenty minutes south of Amarillo, running down the backbone of the southern High Plains on Interstate 27, the land is so prodigiously, stupendously flat that at its margins, at the milky-blue line where sky meets earth, it doesn't end as much as it seems to dissolve. It is so empty of the usual monuments of civilization that structures like grain elevators and cotton gins loom up from the green-brown farmland like medieval fortresses.

You are heading toward lovely, nearly vacant country that, if you pay close enough attention, will teach you a great deal about the High Plains, one of the most peculiar and physically stunning parts of the American West and the last major geographic part of continental America to be colonized. It was conquered and settled in the late 1800's, in spite of a brutally inhospitable climate and a superabundance of hostile and highly motivated Comanches. I have chosen I-27 as the starting point because it offers a breathtaking and instructive view of the agricultural plains. Not only that, but it skirts the east side of Canyon, just south of Amarillo, where you can start your day at the superb Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, a repository of easy-to-absorb information on the history, geology, and economy of the exotic world you are going to see. If the wind...

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