Month: November 2025

Number 80: Enchanted Rock State Natural Area

/ gregariousgregorys / Leave a comment

The morning of our 15 year wedding anniversary, we visited our 80th state park! Enchanted Rock is insanely popular and day passes sell out sometimes in the first hour of opening online 5 months out. Weekends during the cooler months in particularly get packed. We went on a Friday morning and got parked and on the trail by 9:30.

The summit trail is under a mile long with half of it being an uphill burn on the granite mound. The crowd was still manageable and even with a few stops to let large groups pass, we made it to the top in 25 minutes.

We spent another 30 minutes taking in views and even found the USGS marker!

Weston and I were not the biggest fans of the downhill hike with how glaringly obvious it was that we were way up on a big rock and there isn’t anything to catch a fall, but we were very generous with our switchbacks and made it just fine :).

Ambition won for a moment and we attempted part of the Echo Canyon trail offshoot from the summit trail, but gave it half a mile before deciding it was getting too hot and too close to lunchtime. But we did enjoy momentarily exploring another feature of the park.

We grabbed one more shady spot for a break before the final stretch to the car and started to notice the crowd making their way up had increased significantly already.

The rock is remarkable, unique and known worldwide (we heard at least 3 different languages/accents just while we were there), but it’s a one and done for me. There is more to this park than just the rock and I do wish we had prioritized some of it more. If I ever do come back, it would be on a random Tuesday at like 7am and I would hike any other trail but the summit, haha. But now we can say we did it!

-Lindsay

Number 79: Old Tunnel State Park

/ gregariousgregorys / Leave a comment

A big part of the planning for our anniversary trip was securing our reservation for this park. Old Tunnel is Texas’ smallest state park and holds two features within it’s 16 acres. The historic railroad tunnel and the bats that now inhabit it. The park is open during the day for exploration, but after 5pm it’s only open to ticket holders for bat emergence viewing. There’s an upper deck viewing area and a lower viewing area. The lower being the most sought after and limited. So, of course, I booked that one 5 months ahead of time! And it was so worth it.

The park posts on facebook each week when people should arrive to make sure they get the best viewing based on the weather, sunset and recent bat behavior. That week, the post advised to be seated by 6:30. Well, Mrs. If-you-aren’t-early-you-are-late got us there by 5:30. Turns out the park volunteer seminar that is a part of the lower level deck BEGINS at 6:30 and the bats come out sometime after 7pm. So we had some time to kill. We started off descending to the old railroad bed to get awesome glimpses of the bats flurrying in the darkness of the tunnel.

Then we went ahead and parked it in our seats a little before six since more folks were starting to fill in. We killed time playing rock paper scissors until, Dennis, our park volunteer began his presentation. And he was a wealth of knowledge! He covered the history of the railroad and how the tunnel came to be, how the bats started appearing and the conservation efforts in place as well as the biology on the two different species that dwell there.

It was starting to get a few minutes past official sunset and about 20 minutes past when the bats had previously emerged that week and Dennis was starting to explain that we are at their mercy and sometimes they just change their minds when…suddenly, a few appeared! Then a couple hundred, then THOUSANDS formed a “batnadoe” 15 feet from us! They funneled up above the tree line then zoomed off to the horizon like a black river in the sky. The event lasted about 20 minutes and we witnessed approximately 3 million bats that night. I got a couple of slow motion videos and Weston got a pretty good photo, but for the most part, we just sat and stared.

What a drastically different experience we had at Old Tunnel versus Devil’s Sinkhole a few months earlier. A real testament to these wild and unique creatures and their habits. We will carry the memory of that complete sensory experience forever. On our way back to our cabin, we stopped at Bankersmith, a Lukenbach-esque watering hole and had a blast with post bat beverages and the fun scenery.

-Lindsay

Number 78: Pedernales Falls State Park

/ gregariousgregorys / Leave a comment

After Blanco State Park, we arrived in the parking lot for the falls trailhead at Pedernales Falls State Park. We had a tailgate lunch, filled up the camelbacks and headed out for the much anticipated falls.

While there is a less than half mile route to the falls, there is also a 1.5 mile loop that drops down along the river below before arriving at the falls. I pretty much proposed the long way as the only option haha. The Hackenburg Loop was definitely the path less travelled and we enjoyed the quiet river and landscape.

When the trail opened up at the base of the falls, I was blown away by the enormity of it! The first we noticed was the debris line on the beach from the July flooding in the Hill Country. Absolutely astonishing to think about that area raging with floodwaters.

But, on this day, we were able to walk, climb and crawl all over the unique rock structure. We spent an hour exploring every pool, crevice and boulder we could.

We didn’t have enough time and the pictures don’t do it justice. We were on a schedule making sure we got to our bat viewing at Old Tunnel State Park that evening on time. I want to go back so bad and soon. As extraordinary as the falls are, this park has so much more. The trails system is massive and dynamic. While swimming isn’t permitted at the falls or the section of river we hiked near, there is picturesque swimming hole downstream that I would love to check out. We haven’t even fully explored this park and it’s a top 5 favorite.

-Lindsay