Camping in a canyon (in CRAZY wind!), hiking, & BISON at Caprock Canyons State Park in Texas!

This landscape is just so interesting, so wild, and you'd have no idea you're in Texas. It's incredible. That was an experience I'll never forget. Not how we thought this would go. Yesterday we loaded up the van and drove seven hours from Austin to the Texas Panhandle to go camping, hiking, and just enjoy some time living and working in our van for the next week. We have two weekend adventures planned and first up we're exploring Caprock Canyon State Park which is located south of Amarillo by a town called Kitty Quay. The park has a gorgeous orange canyon, a variety of trails, and is home to the official Texas state bison herd. Instead of doing a day hike and sleeping in the van we are backpacking to a primitive campsite in the canyon for the night using air quotes for backpacking because it's only a mile trek to the north prong primitive camping area so it's not too hard or long but we still have to lug all of our stuff out there but we cannot wait to sleep in our tent for what feels like the first time in forever and sleep under the stars in kind of a more remote area away from civilization. Looks like we're back in Utah or Arizona. So beautiful. This is just so different than the hill country where we've been hanging out for the last few months. It's incredible. Two rules at the camping area. One, no ground fires and two, you must camp within 50 yards of this outhouse here. And three, there has to be good sticks. All right now let's go try to find a good spot. To set up camp we gotta do 50 yards. It's pretty close. It's a 30 second walk up here. Well uh we were about to uh fly away at that spot it was not working out so we kind of moved to a little bit lower spot. Still pretty dang good view. Hopefully this one will stay on the ground. Things are already looking much more promising here. Oh wow that was quite the experience. We uh yeah if you haven't picked up yet it is very windy today. I guess late last night early this morning a wind storm came through with winds of about 30 miles an hour and then with gusts of up to like 60-55 miles an hour and it pretty sure felt like it so it was tough. It has been insane. Oh hey Kona. All day long we've just been waiting in the van waiting until we could come out here and actually set up a tent without flying away and for a second we really thought the first spot our tent was it was going to fly away and before we found this spot we were like should we even be doing this like let's just go back in the van and sleep but we've been so excited about this for a week so we stuck it out. Spot number two is seeming a lot more promising and the wind seems to be dying down. It's supposed to keep getting better overnight so I think the rest of our experience here will be will be more more chill less crazy. We got ourselves a little dinner with a view. The sun is setting and the canyon's just getting this really deep orange color and we've had dinner in quite a few beautiful places but this one is top notch. We love backpacking because it gives you the opportunity to get away from people get into more primitive areas yeah there's some people camping over there but you're spread out and the best part is you're kind of in in between and in the middle right immersed in all the beauty you can just get closer to it than just a regular campground things like that so so happy this place worked out. What's wild is that we went from 35 mile per hour winds with like 60 mile per hour gusts to basically no wind at all. The weathermen were not lying when they said it around like four or five it would settle down. Had we gone back to the van and just like given up on this I guarantee you we'd be like running out here right now trying to set up camp so oh what a day. We spent the last couple hours playing a game I won all three times yes and then we went and checked out the night sky and tried to get some really cool night sky photos if any of them turned out decent we'll put them on the screen and then if not they will not be on the screen but now it's time for my favorite part of camping in a tent and that is when Kona gets inside of my sleeping bag and cuddles with me. Kona come on let's go. She's my personal space heater anytime we go camping it's actually not that cold out I think the low is maybe upper 30s low 40s which is great because when you google caprock canyons in January it says the low can be 19 so we were kind of nervous leading up to this trip that it would be really really cold but so far I'm actually kind of hot in all of this so I think we'll be good but it's eight o'clock it's bedtime so we're gonna go to bed and get up before sunrise to hopefully see a nice sunrise outside worst night of sleep ever that was an experience I'll never forget not how we thought this would go so you want to start with the positives so we have a couple positives um I stayed really warm like really really warm I actually was hot I didn't even wear my jacket I just put it on and Kona was a dang good cuddler we cuddled so hard that was awesome any more positives nope that's that's it for positives yeah the temperature was actually really nice um and when we went to bed it was pretty calm outside right like we had our dinner everything was groovy but we also we stalked the weather reports yesterday and it said it would be fine at night like we looked and looked and looked so we it was like a bouncy house in here I don't know it felt like the tent was gonna crash down on us there were times where the wind was pushing the tent so much that the tent was like smashing into my face and I was like it for sure is gonna collapse I made it really difficult to sleep and then as you can see there's dirt and dust everywhere we basically slept in a sandstorm I woke up at one point before I learned that I should just go I should just sleep with my face under the sleeping bag woke up to like a caking of some dirt all over my face all night I had this over my eyes and then the sleeping bag right here and just my nose out so uh yeah like we said it was an experience we'll never forget it was fun but now we really need some coffee oh it's beautiful out here though wow nice morning I am thoroughly surprised that this stuff is still here our dog bowl only made it about a foot away I don't understand how that happened but man look at the light the first light coming up on all the rocks here it's beautiful you still got like a little bit worth it yeah so we made our coffee this morning with our new aero press I think it's the aero press mini because this has a three on it the regular one has a four so it's slightly bigger but it just packs up the cup just goes on top of here and it's just one little tiny unit that packs up nice and small in uh in your backpack so it's perfect for what we're doing smells pretty dang good tastes pretty dang good that's actually really really good I'm not a black coffee drinker I like half and half or oat milk or something just to cream it up a bit but it's really really smooth nailed it my barista all right we packed up most of our stuff and left it at our campsite and now we're hitting the trail to do the haynes ridge and upper north prong loop so we camped right here we're going to go all the way around I think haynes ridge is somewhere right here come back out right here go back up get the rest of our stuff and then head back down to the van it's around 6.3 miles but since we've done part of it but then we also have to go back to the ground we're not really sure but we are going to track our hike on all trails so if you want to follow us on all trails I'll put the link to our url for our profile on the screen that way you can see all of the trails that we do all the trails we want to do in the future we get a lot of questions about all trails so go follow us there we also got a couple questions about this little guy after our garner vlog this is a garment in reach mini we just got it for christmas thank you adam's mom for hooking us up with this guy it's a satellite device that basically lets our loved ones track us we can send them text messages to let them know we made it somewhere safely that we're doing okay all without having the need for cell phone service and if we got in a really bad situation and we were hurt hopefully we never have to use this feature there is an sos button that we can press and then someone will come and help us so we're a little over a mile into the upper north prong trail we're just walking around here and we're just being surrounded by these canyon walls and we just keep telling ourselves like man this is so cool look at that oh wow feels like we're in arizona feels like we're in utah this landscape is just so interesting so wild and you'd have no idea you're in texas it's incredible it's kind of hard to see but there's a really neat rock formation right behind us and my favorite part is there are these two tower things sticking out of the top and i saw photos of this online before we got here and ever since i saw a photo it looks to me like santa stuck in the chimney it just looks like little santa legs just dangling in the air i don't know why i think that but it's cool to see it in real life the trail starts out pretty flat the direction we went and now it's starting to get pretty steep it's a cave with ferns i think it's called a fern cave it's pretty neat it's kind of like hamilton pool where we were last weekend the water dripping down and those were probably ferns too there maybe in the photo we saw before we came they were all green now they're all brown and dead looking we finally made it to the scenic overlook haynes ridge overlook yeah haynes ridge overlook we were getting kind of nervous because we were hiking hiking we were making it to it and we're getting nervous that we've been checking all trails and maybe it's up here maybe it's up here but we finally made it and it's a gorgeous view the wind's up here but it's okay because man you just get these red canyon deep orange color with the green kind of offsetting it it's beautiful we can see our tent see the outhouse and then the tent just off to the side of it pretty cool i don't know if i'm pointing at it it's somewhere right there blends in pretty well awesome almost there it's a pretty intense hike down from the overlook just fyi we are all packed up and ready to head back to the van we're gonna miss this sick amazing gorgeous campsite but we will not miss the wind that came with it one thing we forgot to mention about the primitive camping here is that you do reserve it in advance just to get the permit i think it's 12 and basically that just gets you the permit and then when you get here you pick the actual spot you want you may not have to reserve it in advance we saw some people getting their permits the day of when we got here but if you come during the busier season it's probably a safer bet and there is one at least one other primitive camping area but you cannot beat the views here so as we mentioned at the beginning of the video the park is home to the official texas state bison herd the bison were donated to texas parks and wildlife in 1997 and moved to caprock canyon state park and they did some dna testing on them and it turns out they are unique from any bison in north america and they are the last remaining bison of the southern plains variety so we're driving around the park to try to show you guys all the bison and we can't find them anywhere and what's funny is the last two days that we were here before we went on the backpacking trip we saw them everywhere they were all over the visitor center parking lot they were just on the side of the road crossing the road traffic bison jams so we were like oh surely we'll have no problem seeing them in a couple days when we're actually filming and then now we can't find them they're nowhere to be found so i don't know maybe they're napping somewhere but we did get a few clips of them during our past couple days here so we'll put that on the screen that way you can see them but i don't know they've been easy to find normally until today we ended up booking a campsite in the park for the next five nights for a whopping 76 dollars with our texas state park pass it's a really good deal because it comes with power it comes with water we have cell service there's this cool pavilion picnic table thing at every campsite that we're going to work at it's going to be the best work week ever we have one more adventure here in the panhandle before we head back to austin but in our next video we're going to do the q a that we were supposed to do on the drive up here but then we quickly learned that it's really hard to do a q a when there's a ton of road noise you're trying to drive you're trying there's wind and there's a lot of factors so we're going to do it here instead so thank you so much to everyone who submitted questions for the q a we're going to try to answer as many of them as we possibly can there's so much dust everywhere i think i have sand in like my ears my nose my teeth it's gritty for a whopping 76 dollars with our texas state what to do with my hands this kid start out from the bottom now we're here