The Texas Panhandle - Day 2

We started the morning off by doing some Virtual caches around Amarillo. They vary in subject matter, from a free spinning marble globe, a train that speaks to the railroad history of Amarillo, etc. Amarillo was once known as the self-proclaimed "Helium Capital of the World" for having one of the country's most productive helium fields. There are many geocaches that accent this history so we visited a few.


Don Harrington Discovery Center, located in the city's hospital district, is an interactive science center and space theater with over 60 hands-on exhibits. The structure at these coordinates is the Helium Monument, commemorating the 100th anniversary of the discovery of helium on the sun in 1868. The Helium Monument is really four time capsules (sealed caches?!). The first was opened after 25 years in 1993. The contents are on display in the adjacent museum. The other three will be opened after 50, 100, and 1000 years. Among the most interesting things in the capsules is the passbook in the 1000 year capsule to a bank account with a $10 deposit. It is projected to be worth $1 quadrillion when opened in 2968! That likely makes this the most valuable geocache on record, if you are willing to wait until 2968.


After the museum we visited the site of one of the largest helium factories in Amarillo. I love this story about the discovery of Helium in the area:

Nine million cubic feet of gas was escaping each day before the equipment could be found to cap the well, and the drilling company wasted no time in selling stock and planning for additional wells. A jubilant crowd gathered in the small town of Dexter, Kansas, in May 1903. Dexter was pinning its hopes for economic prosperity on a newly drilled well that had unleashed "a howling gasser."

To celebrate their good fortune, the people of Dexter planned a huge celebration, complete with band music, patriotic speeches and games. The lighting of the escaping gas was planned as the spectacular climax to the day's events. Promotional circulars promised "a great pillar of flame from the burning well will light the entire countryside for a day and a night."

After an exhilarating address by the mayor, the excited gathering watched with anticipation as a burning bale of hay was slowly moved into contact with the gusher. Instead of the expected conflagration, the flames of the burning bale were quickly extinguished. Undaunted, the mayor repeated the process several times, but with the same results. Disappointed and puzzled, the crowd slowly dispersed.

Dismay over the gas well's failure spread throughout Kansas, but Erasmus Haworth, the official state geologist, was intrigued by this unusual event. Haworth arranged for a large cylinder to be filled with the “Dexter Gas” and began a routine analysis of the cylinder's contents. The results readily gave a scientific explanation to the Dexter puzzle.

The gas contained only 15% combustible methane, which would not burn in the presence of almost 72% nonflammable nitrogen, and 12% of an unknown “inert gas” which was later identified as helium. Haworth’s results were reported to a Geological Society of America meeting in Philadelphia on Dec. 30, 1904.

The Cadillac Ranch, located along the historic Route 66, was built in 1974, brainchild of Stanley Marsh 3, the helium millionaire who owns the dusty wheat field where it stands. Marsh and The Ant Farm, a San Francisco art collective, assembled used Cadillacs representing the "Golden Age" of American Automobiles (1949 through 1963). The ten graffiti-covered cars are half-buried, nose-down, facing west "at the same angle as the Cheops' pyramids. The feet of Ozymandius we had visited the day before were created by the same group. This was my favorite stop on our trip, it doesn't seem like much at first but is such a unique piece of Americana. It can't be missed. I was able to sign my Geocaching handle to the monument before we left then we headed east towards Oklahoma.


I have been through Amarillo a few times before while traveling from Alabama to New Mexico for geology field camp. So I knew there was a giant cross near town but I've never had a chance to stop and see just how enormous it is confirming the "Everything's bigger in Texas" mantra. It is huge, there isn't much else to be said. The church that built it is undergoing renovations but there are copies of the ten commandments, the Shroud of Turin, the Stations of the Cross, Jesus' tomb, etc. We spent a bit of time checking everything out but then a tour bus pulled in so we figured it was about to get crazy and rolled on to the next stop.


We stopped at two different rest areas along the Interstate east of Amarillo. One was themed after Route 66 with white lined sidewalks painted to look like roads and murals of the route map made of recycled tire mats. There was also a huge playground for the kids. The other was more traditional and featured an indoor display on wind mills and wind turbines.


The older sections of Route 66 are more accessible to the east of Amarillo so we stopped in several towns and saw remnants of what was once America's greatest highway. Seems like it would have been a lot more fun than the monotonous Interstates we drive today, but most long trips are more about the destination than the trip nowadays. The historic Conoco gas station below is a neat little Route 66 museum now, but even more fun is the fact that they used it's architecture as inspiration for Romero's Garage in the first Cars movie! Who knew?


The rest of the day was an exploration of the less populated parts of the extreme northern panhandle. There are more canyonlands than I expected to see based on the surrounding high plains and those were fun to drive through. We saw few people but came across suicidal cats, rabbits, owls, and one frog that got his wish. We arrived home after 2AM but managed to cover all the territory the Panhandle has to offer. I still want to make a return trip to further explore Amarillo and Lake Meredith to the north.

Oh yeah, we saw this too:

The Texas Panhandle - Day 1

Late last week a friend and fellow geocacher asked if I would be interested in going on a road trip to find a geocache in every county in the Texas Panhandle. Since I hadn't been in that area since I began geocaching I jumped at the chance. There is a challenge cache to find a cache in every county in Texas, while that is no small feat, I think I can do it in chunks like the trip we took this weekend. We saw a lot of interesting things and a lot of absolute empty hills and plains. the weather was hot but not unbearably so. Amarillo stands out of all the towns we visited with its many parks and long history. We also saw a lot of historic Route 66 along the way which was fun.


After leaving Midland, TX and heading north we drove until we reached Lamesa. There wasn't a whole lot to see there except an old drive in movie theater. For some reason the sign struck me as funny because it proclaims in neon that the films will be "in color." I suppose that back in the day that was an important feature. After that we made a quick detour to the east so I could grab a cache in neighboring Borden county.


We arrived in Plainview, Texas and struck out on the first cache we looked for so we went after another one called Downtown (in plain view). The cache is pretty standard but the location is interesting as it is a diner used in the film Leap of Faith from 1992 starring Steve Martin. There is a mural for the fictional restaurant on the side of the building, and the town's water tower still bears the mascot and name Rustwater, Kansas even though Plainview is very much in Texas.


Our next major stop was in Briscoe County (Jr. - sorry I feel compelled to do that every time. Bruce Campbell rocks!). There is a historic jail on the corner of the court house lawn and as we were extracting the geocache there a man drove up asking if we wanted to see the jail. It took a second to realize he was actually a caretaker offering to open the small museum just for us! He was a very friendly guy, maybe slightly too much so but he said he had been running the museum for years since the judge noticed people were interested in seeing inside. It was beginning to get dark and he told us that the bats would soon be coming out of all the bat houses on the side of the building so we made our exit after thanking him for the improvised tour. As we were leaving he gave us a pamphlet of panhandle museums and attractions featuring none other than himself as the guide for the museum.


The last stop of the day was a virtual cache just outside of Amarillo known as "The Feet of Ozymandius." Ozymandius, aside from a kick ass villain in the graphic novel Watchmen, was another name for Ramesses the Great. Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote a poem about him in 1818:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: `Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.'

The virtual cache brings you to what appears to be a shattered statue with only the feet remaining. A plaque says that the statue was destroyed by Lubbock football players after a loss to Amarillo, but the truth is that the statue was commissioned by Stanley Marsh 3. That's the same guy who created the Cadillac Ranch which we would visit the next day.


The we crashed at a KOA, choosing not to worry about tents with the cool weather that night. Plus we may be a little lazy.