Palo Duro—Unique

Points of View

 

By Dale Johnson

Is there still room for the kind of programing we produce?  It seems that the Travel Channel has descended into producing material like Beaches of the World with lots of skin.

But there is probably room for the kind of material we produce, for the persons genuinely interested in travel itself.

We have to look for the hook…for that ‘gee whiz’ fact or idea that will capture the interest of the viewer.

For example, the second largest canyon in the United States is Palo Duro Canyon of Texas.  That’s a surprising fact to many folk, even to people who live in the State.

Palo Duro doesn’t compare, of course, to the Grand Canyon, but does have it’s own set of interesting circumstances and facts.  The final battle to subdue and subjugate the American Indian was staged here in 1874.

In that year Col. Ranald Mackenzie surprised a large encampment of Comanches, Kiowas, and Apaches, in the Canyon.  He managed to capture most of their entire remuda, their herd of horses on which they depended for hunting, transport and defense.  About 1,400 animals.

Col. Mackenzie allowed his men to pick out the best horses, and the rest, over a 1,000 animals, were simply shot.  This left the Indians without transportation and virtually defenseless in their war with the U.S. Army, and they were eventually consigned to the marginal reservation lands set aside for them in the West.

Also found here are 200,000 bats that fly out of these canyons every night to consume tons of cotton bollworm moths in the agricultural regions nearby.  The south plains of Texas is the largest contiguous cotton producing region in the world, and that production is made possible because of an enormous underground lake of water called the Oglala Aquifer, which runs from the Black Hills of South Dakota to the southern plains of the Texas Panhandle.

Originally that water supply was thought to be inexhaustible, but thousands of wells for a 100 years have lowered the water level.  Formerly, a well would tap into the water source at 30 feet.  Now, maybe 300 feet.  The water level continues to decline at a yearly rate.  What will be the impact…not just to farmers, but to the entire economy?

These facts are intrinsically interesting in and of themselves. If ways can be found to illustrate or elucidate this kind of information photographically, the resulting document can be most fascinating to an audience.

It’s not enough to take pictures of a series of street scenes and devise some sort of inane narrative to accompany it.  There has to be real meat, in the sense that a viewer is learning something of compelling interest in a travel documentary.

The History Channel, Discovery Channel, National Geo Channel, et al, seek to do the same thing, and they do it well.  We compete with them.

But each of us has our own unique vision to apply to any given subject.  We just have to do it with as much professionalism, and respect for the subject matter itself, in order to make it a document that can open new insights about the world in which we live.

Windoes Travelogues

1-800-541-0541

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