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Amarillo sits in the Texas Panhandle at 3,600 feet elevation on the Llano Estacado -- the flat, windswept tableland that stretches in every direction with the kind of horizontal clarity that either oppresses or liberates, depending on your disposition. The city built itself on cattle, helium, and Route 66, and all three histories are still legible in the landscape. The Big Texan Steak Ranch on I-40 has been offering a free 72-ounce steak since 1960 to anyone who can eat it with all the sides in under an hour -- the attempt has a theatrical component that the restaurant leans into with full commitment, seating successful and failing challengers on a raised stage.

Cadillac Ranch, on the western edge of the city off I-40, is the piece of public art that Texas Route 66 generated: ten Cadillacs, model years 1949 to 1963, buried nose-first in a wheat field at the same angle as the Great Pyramid of Giza in 1974 by the art collective Ant Farm.

Visitors spray paint them and the layers accumulate daily. Palo Duro Canyon, 25 kilometers southeast, is a different scale entirely: the second largest canyon in the United States, 120 miles long and 800 feet deep, cut by the Prairie Dog Town Fork of the Red River through the Llano surface. It is called the Grand Canyon of Texas and, in its quiet way, earns the comparison.