On our first-ever backpacking/hiking/camping expedition, my 16yo son and I went to Enchanted Rock State Natural Area in the TX Hill Country Thursday, hiked two miles to our primitive campsite, spent the night and scaled the 1,865-ft granite monolith the next morning. WE HAD THE BEST TIME!!!

It was really a lessons-learned outing for us, and a lot of the advice and pointers I picked up from you all really held true. So glad I found this site! I've got some questions now based on our experiences but I'll post those separately. Now, for the trip report and what we learned:

We dallied too long in leaving San Antonio and didn't allow enough time to reach our location before the sun started to set. Google Maps let me down on the time estimate to reach Enchanted Rock (ER). The twisting, skinny ranch road didn't allow for high-speed travel. Anyway, we reached ER about 10 minutes after the ranger station had closed. Not sure what to do, we filled out the form hanging on a bulletin board, claimed a primitive campsite, stuck the parking sticker on our windshield and headed out. It was about a 2.5 mile uphill hike from the parking lot to our selected campsite. It was gorgeous with the sun setting! You’d think City Boy had never seen the great outdoors! It was starting to get dark by the time we reached our campsite, it was dark but we’d practiced setting up the tent at home and had no problem doing it by headlamp. The MSR pocket rocket worked like a champ to boil water to rehydrate dinner – T went with a Mountain Home meal, and I tried a Knorr pasta mix. He liked his; mine tasted OK but was far too soupy. It was getting chilly by then so we retired to our tent, changed into our thermals with fleece pull-overs on top, and spent the next several hours playing card games and reading. We shared a bag of pretzels for a late night snack and turned in officially about 10:00pm.

And then the wind started. I was certain we were going to be lifted off the ground and deposited in Oz! The wind howled all night long. You could hear it rolling in from a distance, passing over us and continuing down into the basin (canyon? valley?). It was a neat sound – repeated over and over and over. I’m an extremely light sleeper in the best of conditions, and I lay awake all night listening to the wind. T woke when the wind really kicked up and stayed awake for several hours, falling asleep again maybe about 4:00am. About 5:30am, the temp dropped to its lowest point, about 38 degrees. The temp inside the tent hovered around 50 degrees, which felt cool to me. I slept with a knit hat and fleece gloves in addition to the thermals and the fleece pull-over. I would have liked to have been a little warmer, but T as fine with just thermals and fleece pull-over. He didn’t fit into his sleeping bag very well, though, and got chilled for that reason.

I crawled out of the tent about 7:00am, when it was daylight and the air had warmed a few degrees. I put my unzipped sleeping bag over T, and he slept for another couple of hours. I put the MSR pocket rocket to use again and made coffee in my 16oz insulated travel mug. I read until T woke up. We enjoyed instant mashed potatoes for breakfast. Then, we packed up our stuff, deposited it in our car and hiked to the top of Enchanted Rock. What a view!

We can’t wait to go out again … maybe in a couple of weeks.