Let me start by saying that the world is a beautiful place and there is so much wonder and magic in it and there is just no excuse not to enjoy every moment of it. Find yourself some friends who are willing to go on adventures with you (and do them OFTEN) and your body, mind and soul will thank you.
This post is dedicated to my amazing friends who trusted me enough to plan a 24 hour trip in the grueling 100-degree Texas heat to climb this majestic rock.
But, before I get ahead of myself, let’s talk about STONEHENGE. I don’t know if you guys are aware, but there is a 60% scale replica of Stonehenge right here in Texas! So naturally, we had to have a picnic there.
It’s located in Ingram, TX, near Fredericksburg.
There was this local theater and arts place next to the monument. This guy named Jeff let us play around on the stage. Thanks Jeff.
You can see in the next picture a river running behind the stage. According to Jeff there are actually 2 rivers that converge at this location, the Guadalupe River and Johnson Creek. This was a strong spiritual sign to the natives who lived here. They believed that rivers represent the flow of spiritual energy and having two meet marked a sacred space.
From there it was an hour drive to Enchanted Rock where we would spend the night and next morning. There she was, waiting patiently for us to explore her experienced surface.
The heat was hot.
So basically, Enchanted Rock is a big, pink granite dome. Really big actually. It’s the largest one in the U.S. Our theater tour guide Jeff told us about how at night, when the granite cools, it makes a moaning noise. For this reason, the natives believed this to be spiritual as well. They believed that it was a holy portal to other worlds.
So how about that? The two locations we went to happened to both be sacred. We were on holy ground and this trip was nothing short of spiritual for me.
It took us about half an hour of climbing across some pretty difficult rocks to get to our campsite. It wouldn’t have been so bad except we were all loaded down with gear with both hands full. Not too fun when you slip and can’t catch yourself. But alas, we made it.
Exhausted and dehydrated, we set up camp. We took time to rest and hydrate while we made plans on how to spend the remainder of the evening.
Daonte, Sandra and myself decided to go exploring around camp while John and Erick hung back to hold down the fort.
After about an hour we headed back to camp to relax. We all had some dinner and shared a bottle of wine. About that time the sun was going down so I decided to go ahead and set up the telescope while I had some light. We were lucky enough to have this nice miniature granite dome within a couple hundred feet of our camp with an open view of the sky. We got some pillows and got comfortable and waited for it to get dark.
This was the crown jewel of the trip. Enchanted Rock Park is an International Dark Sky Park. This means no light pollution. We were able to see the plane of the Milky Way. There were so many stars visible that I couldn’t make out the constellations I’m familiar with.
But let’s talk about the shooting stars…
Every shooting star I have ever seen in my life before this trip was just a little blip of light that zipped across the sky and disappeared. Not these. You could see from the moment it entered the atmosphere until it burned up and vanished. It was like fireworks. They had tails, like little comets! The irony of it all is that this is always going on. We just miss out on it. And seeing it clearly, as clearly as the naked eye can, you truly feel the realization that we are monkeys on a rock, suspended in this thing that we affectionately call “space.”
I urge you, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, find a place with little or no light, lay on the ground, and just look at the sky at night.
Unfortunately I have no pictures of this. They just can’t do it justice. You just had to be there man (*hippie voice).
So far the trip has been solid as a rock (intended). We decide to get some sleep, so we head back to camp.
We smell. It’s so hot in the tent. There’s a threshold of how much clothing is acceptable to remove when sharing a 10×10 with two other dudes. So, falling asleep isn’t as easy as we’d thought.
My body and mind finally start to relax. I’m drifting off to dreamland. Then we hear it. Rustling in the leaves. Can’t be more than 20 feet away. Shit. My first thought was I am way too tired to fight a bear right now (HA!). We started making noise and clapping to scare whatever it was off. Silence. It would be another tense half-hour before it left. It was probably a raccoon or a squirrel or something, but in that moment it was life or death! I had my hand on my knife the whole time. We were all ready to fight to protect our tribe. It was kind of exhilarating to be honest. We heard coyotes too. It was raw nature. She was welcoming us in. The message was, “Ready or not, here we come!”
After a night of “sleep,” we all got up to pack up. It was about 5:30. We had planned to pack up, take the gear back to the car, and then climb to the top of Enchanted Rock. Climbing with all the gear would just be too dangerous.
The view was spectacular!
Here’s John doing a headstand on top of the world:
This trip reminded me of some things. It reminded me that no matter how much is going on in your life there is always a high thing that you can look out at other lower things and feel significant. And then there’s bright things in the night sky that are millions of light-years away and millions of times larger than the thing you’re standing on that will humble you. Rent seems to disappear in these moments.
I leave you with this amazing video put together by the talents of Sir John Ward.
alchitecture 