Enchanted Rock

The largest pink granite monadnock in America, 425 feet of bare rock

Enchanted Rock is a dome of pink granite in the Llano Uplift of the Texas Hill Country, 17 miles north of Fredericksburg, straddling the line between Gillespie and Llano counties. It covers about 640 acres and rises some 425 feet above the brush to 1,825 feet above the sea, the largest pink granite monadnock in the United States, visible for miles across the basin. The dome is only the exposed crown of a buried ridge, part of a batholith geologists call the Town Mountain Granite, which forced its way into older Packsaddle Schist about 1,082 million years ago. Erosion stripped away the softer rock around it, mostly Cretaceous Edwards limestone, and left the granite standing alone.

People have been coming here for at least 10,000 years; the oldest authenticated spear point found in the park is a Plainview point of that age, and older ones have turned up along the creeks nearby. The Tonkawa, Apache and Comanche all credited the rock with spiritual power. The Tonkawa told of ghost fires flickering on the summit, and of the creaking and groaning the dome makes at night, which geologists put down to the granite contracting as it cools after a day in the sun. The rock has also been called the Crying Rock. Tradition holds that Native people hid on its top two tiers, out of sight from the ground. A plaque once set near the summit claims that in the fall of 1841 the ranger captain John C. Hays, cut off from his company, held off a whole Comanche band from the top.

The legends multiplied. A princess who threw herself from the rock after watching her people slaughtered, a chief condemned to walk it forever whose footprints are still pressed into the stone, a white woman whose screams are heard at night, a lost silver or gold mine, and a Spanish soldier, Don Jesús Navarro, who rescued a chief's daughter named Rosa from sacrifice on the summit. Hermann Lungkwitz painted it at least six times, the first in 1864, hiking a mile and a half through mesquite every day to reach his viewpoint.

Today it is Enchanted Rock State Natural Area, a National Natural Landmark since 1971 and an International Dark Sky Park. More than 500 kinds of plants grow there, from plateau live oak to prickly pear, Texas horned lizards live here, and fairy shrimp hatch in the vernal pools on the bare rock. Climbing the dome is almost a rite of passage for Texans. Nearly 22 miles of trails wind through the park, rock climbers check in at headquarters, and painting graffiti on the granite is a state felony.