We left Atlanta State Park (near the Louisiana and Arkansas border, so just about as east and north as you can get and still be in TX!) pretty early on the morning of Sunday, April 3. Our ‘flight path’ was essentially due west as we had been able to book campgrounds at regular intervals, including at some of the most popular/ scenic campgrounds in the Texas Panhandle. But being curious, and having seen quite a bit of ‘scenic highway’ through the Ouachita National Forest in Oklahoma just north of our location, we decided we would add some miles to our first ‘on the road’ day and loop north just to see what Oklahoma had to offer. Yes, this was the same National Forest where Janine did her ‘birthday gravel adventure’ in Arkansas. We planned for about an 8 hour driving day, including most of both the Mountain Pass and Mountain Gate Scenic Highways in Oklahoma (more on those here), to get us to Eisenhower State Park, just northwest of Dallas. So, a full driving day but not over the top.
Southeast Oklahoma was quite hilly and dry, similar to western Arkansas but seemingly a little less hospitable. We saw a lot of forest, a few towns that seemed focused on tourism and outdoor adventure and not too many side roads. Our route took us north/up and then west/down into more farm land which shifted gradually from rolling to very flat as we headed west near the Texas/Oklahoma border. We didn’t see alot to get excitd about, but it was nice to have some idea of what’s in Oklahoma!
Soon enough we crossed back into Texas and took our freeway exit for Eisenhower State Park. It turned out to be a huge park on a really huge lake – Lake Texoma, which is one of the largest reservoirs in the US and the US Army Corp of Engineers’ 12th largest lake, at 89,000 surface acres. It definitely had almost a ‘Great Lakes’ feel to it from shore, as it was just lake and more lake on the horizon. Interestingly, the Red River, which feeds the lake from the west, has a high salt-water content, which has led to Lake Texoma holding the only self-sustaining population of striped bass (a saltwater fish) in Texas! There is more of the lake in Oklahoma than in Texas, but apparently the name Okla-as isn’t quite as compelling as Texoma!! Mike never got a chance to fish, but it sure seemed like a popular fishing area! Arriving on a Sunday late afternoon, we even saw what looked like a fishing tournament finishing up!
We spent two nights at Eisenhower, giving us time for a short bike ride within the park on arrival, and on Monday a longer morning hike as well as a trip to the nearby town of Denison, which we really liked! Not too small, not too big… with plenty of older homes! Denison might have been our favorite Texas town!. That night we ‘enjoyed’ a pretty big rain/wind/thunder and lightning storm, right up until an emergency warning came on the TV (all channels, we realized as we surfed through) of a llikely tornado touch-down nearby. From the map we could see that the predicted landing site was about 15 miles away, so while not TOO close, it was near enough to raise our BP a little! It ended up not happening but was quite a good ‘reality check’ for us!
Tuesday morning, we were off to Copper Breaks State Park, about a 5 hour drive and a world of weather change away. Just inside the Texas Panhandle, Copper Breaks was a miniature ‘badlands’ sort of region. Generally, a badlands area is basically land carved up by a river, leaving a wide swath of destruction/erosion. As we got closer to the panhandle region, we noticed it was getting flatter, drier, windier and HOTTER at an alarming rate. Talk about desolation! Especially so quickly after the lush greenery around Lake Texoma, it was When we arrived at Copper Breaks at about 2pm, it was shockingly hot, about 90 degrees, and there was no visible life of any sort stirring. The park, which encompasses a ‘badlands’ area of arroyos, mesas and juniper ‘breaks’ centers around Lake Copper Breaks and was formed by an ancient inland sea, offered the only interruption on the horizon, with some trees and lots of scrub appearing as we began to drop down into the eroded area. It turned out that about 2/3 of the park was temporarily closed to cars due to construction on a bridge just past the first campground. No wonder we had been able to get a spot so easily! It seemed strangely like a ghost town (or perhaps a ghost-campground!).
These sites near the park entrance offered no hookups, but happily we were able to get a site near a water faucet, and, as we were the only/first campers in the campground, we went right ahead and hooked up our hose. By the time we had set up camp and let the cats out of their carrier, it was 92 degrees and still climbing. Prudently, we decided to rest in the trailer till it cooled off and then get out for a little exploration. We finally managed to stagger out and go for a mountain bike ride at about 5:30pm when the temperature was still near 95, but the direct sun was just about over. We checked out the trails, of which there were a LOT, including a huge multi-purpose trail system that was probably ideally suited to ATV’s but open to horses, hikers and MTB’s too. We never saw a soul, and managed to time our ride to arrive back at the campground just as dusk fell. One other couple in a spirinter van had arrived, but that was about it! We had a cold dinner and settled in for a HOT night! Copper Breaks was interesting but we didn’t feel compelled to return any time soon!
Wednesday morning we got up and hit the road before the heat became overwhelming, for a short 90 minute drive to Canyonlands State Park, which we had been looking forward to, since we started looking at the Texas State Park system. Canyonlands and the nearby Palo Duro State Park are two of the most-visited and (behind Big Bend Ranch, where we started this adventure!) largest of the Texas State Parks. Canyonlands, while not quite as spectacular as Palo Duro (known as “The Grand Canyon of Texas”) boasted miles of mountain bike trails and a 65 mile Rail to Trail route. And, when we booked a month earlier, we couldn’t get more than one consecutiave day at Palo Duro but we managed to get a 2-night stay at Canyonlands. So that made the choice easy!
On arrival, we found the best feature of the campground was the prairie dog village just adjacent to the restrooms. They were SO CUTE! We set up camp as soon as the previous campers wheeled out, around noon, and geared up for what turned out to be the best and biggest mountain bike ride of the trip. It was pretty spectacular and ranged from enjoyable to super-sandy creekbeds to some pretty technical (for us anyway!) double-track. There was about 30 miles of trail and we did about half.
The rock formations were breath-taking. It was slow-going in parts and the ride took about twice the time we had anticipated. Just when we thought we might not make it back alive, we popped out on pavement for a quick mile or so back to camp. An AWESOME adventure! Post-ride, it was on the cool side that night, but pleasant.
On Thursday morning, we rode out of the park in extreme wind, to find that the rail-trail was a bit of a bust. The trail was well-documented and featured some presumably cool tunnels and trestles a reasonable distance (like 10 or 12 miles) from our park entrance to the trail, which initially seemed do-able. Unfortunately we had a few strikes against us: the trail (if you could call it that!), an incredibly rough sod/sand combination, was suffering from an extreme lack of maintenance with full exposure to the 25 MPH wind, which was bad enough, but when, about 3 miles in, we saw the piles of goat-head thorns sticking out of our (thankfully tubeless) tires, we knew we had to revise our plan.
We came upon an excellent quality dirt road and took it in the general direction back toward the park. We took a moment to thoroughly remove all remaining thorns from tires and found we had lost some air, but thankfully had over-filled a bit in anticipation of a smooth hard surface, and all was OK! We zigged and zaged a bit and found our way back to the main road and began the long slog into the wind back to camp. We ended up with a shorter ride which gave us the opportunity to explore more of the trails right next to our campsite. So we were able to rack up a full day’s worth of activity in spite of challenges!
Friday morning, tired but satisfied, we got on the road for our last drive in Texas. We were heading for Albuquerque!