Enchanted Rock, Texas

Climbing with the spirits

By CivJet

Nils and I were a few miles past Llano when the tip of Enchanted Rock appeared, a sliver of pink granite suddenly sprouting from the horizon. We had been driving west for hours, watching the greenery of Texas' hill country gradually give way to parched flatland. Now, as its granite dome rose over the highway like a miniature Uluru, there was something uncanny about Enchanted Rock.

Enchanted Rock has its fair share of ghosts. In his history The Enchanted Rock, author Ira Kennedy writes that nearby Tonkawa believed that the spirits of the dead roamed the mountain, while the Comanche told stories of ghost fires and unearthly groans. In the imaginations of Texan treasure hunters, Enchanted Rock was a place of fantastic riches, packed with lost Spanish mines and fat veins of ore.

Nils and I had come to Enchanted Rock with a humbler goal. As the second-largest rock dome in the United States, Enchanted Rock is a prime destination for climbing in all its forms, from casual hiking to technical climbing. For Nils, a climbing wall regular and one of my best friends, the chance to do some real scrambling and caving had just looked too good to pass up.

It was about 10:30 AM when we started our hike to the summit, but the trail was already crowded. Some groups had small children in tow, and a few climbers had even brought their dogs. However, while the path itself wasn't difficult, the dry heat and complete exposure of the rock made for slow going. With no trees or other features to help us gauge height, the bare slope played tricks on our eyes. I felt like we were walking on a granite treadmill; no matter how far we climbed, we never seemed to get any closer to the summit.

In folk tales, the summit of Enchanted Rock is a kind of purgatory, an in-between place for souls burdened by crimes or grudges against the living. The Handbook of Texas relates the legend of a chief who supposedly suffered this fate as punishment for sacrificing his own daughter. According to the story, it was his spirit's ceaseless pacing that wore the divots in Enchanted Rock's surface.

Eventually, the trail leveled off into a broad plateau, and we found ourselves standing on top of Enchanted Rock. Below us, the land spread out like a road map, a patchwork of plains, two-lane highways and bare stone hills that stretched to the horizon in every direction. It was as if we had climbed onto the roof of the desert. We spent a few minutes snapping pictures in the intense heat before heading back down.

Our next stop was Enchanted Rock Cave, a 350-meter long, 30-meter deep fissure running down one side of the rock's dome. For nearby Apache, Enchanted Rock Cave was home to the gan, powerful mountain spirits responsible for curing illness and protecting the Apache from their enemies. Unfortunately, the cave's easy accessibility has proven to be a conservation liability, as visitors with little or no experience with cave conservation have damaged the fissure's native fauna and left behind litter in the course of their explorations;

With the help of a trail map, Nils and I finally tracked down the cave entrance, a narrow gap in the rock just under the summit. While we checked our gear, a man with a thick South African accent argued with his son over whether or not to go inside.

"We don't have a torch," said the exasperated father. "I'm not going in without a torch."

After about half an hour of wriggling through paper-thin squeezes and chimneying down slick vertical drops, Nils and I agreed that this would not be the best cave for a family outing. Just getting ourselves and our packs through was taking a good deal of teamwork, not to mention a smidgen of muscle. Still, we were enjoying ourselves

"This actually makes an awesome rock slide," I commented to Nils at one point, as I slipped my way down a slab of granite. In the lantern's glow, I saw Nils grimace. We were deep inside one of the largest hunks of stone in the United States, and I had not chosen my words carefully.

"Dude," he groaned, "don't say 'rock slide'."

Among the many spirits said to have been swallowed into Enchanted Rock, there is one that came back to tell his tale. According to local legend, a Spanish conquistador once escaped a group of pursuing Tonkawa by climbing Enchanted Rock and vanishing. Mystified, the Tonkawa whispered that he had cast a spell over the mountain.

The conquistador had a different explanation. It was the mountain, he would later tell his comrades, that had cast a spell over him. For a while, he had become part of Enchanted Rock itself.

"When I was swallowed by the rock, I joined the many spirits who enchant this place." he said.

As I stood outside our tent and watched the sun set behind the cliffs that evening, I didn't need magic to understand how Enchanted Rock wove its spell. It was there in front of my eyes. It was the clouds of buzzards riding the last thermals from the cooling granite, the way that the rock faces seemed to grow and shift as dusk fell.

Deep down, I envied the ghosts

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