Last weekend Nick and I made a trip down to Enchanted Rock State Natural Area. The two of us had been eager to shoot stars again and this placed seemed to be fit for that purpose. After reading more about the place I discovered that there was a ton of rock climbing potential so I became even more psyched for the trip. We loaded up the car with a crash pad and our cameras and arrived at the park with enough time to summit the main dome for sunset. "Enchanted Rock", the main granite dome in the area, is massive. It stands 425 feet tall and its giant round entirety covers 640 acres. As we were climbing up it we felt like we were on a different planet. Granite rock rose steadily in front of us and its perfectly smooth feature was broken only by the occasional patch of grass which sat in its own secluded pool of shallow water. These patches looked like tiny individual ecosystems and served as host to collections of different bugs. During the day these bugs stayed in hiding, but after the sun went down our headlamps constantly revealed various bugs scurrying across the granite dome. Our first night, Nick and I stayed on top of the dome for hours sitting in awe of the stars and the unique environment that we had climbed into. The next day we discovered that this place was extremely hot. We were able to climb a few boulders before noon, but my mid-day it had become extremely hot, and like the bugs of the small grassy ecosystems we were forced into shaded hiding until the sun went down again. When that finally happened we hopped on some more boulders to finish the day climbing, then spent the rest of the night taking more photographs of stars.
