Palo Duro to Big Bend across the empty quarter
Two stops, 290 miles apart, and almost nothing but sky between them. Amarillo (KAMA) opens onto Palo Duro Canyon — 120 miles long, 800 feet deep, the second-largest canyon in the country, a sudden gash in the Panhandle's flatness — with Cadillac Ranch's buried tailfins nearby. South across the empty quarter to Marfa (KMRF) and the Trans-Pecos: Big Bend, the only national park to hold an entire mountain range, where the Rio Grande knifes through Santa Elena Canyon's 1,500-foot walls; McDonald Observatory on Mount Locke under some of the darkest skies in North America; and the Marfa Lights, splitting and vanishing over the Chinatis since the 1880s, still unexplained.