A Seat Fit For a King

Between excessive heat, a series of summer colds and one ginormous wind storm, we're a little behind in our Park Questing. Going into the weekend, we'd only completed Cedarville and the online History Mystery quests.

According to my thermometer (which hangs mostly in the shade) Saturday was 103 degrees. We barely left the house. Sunday was forecast to be 95, mild by comparison.

Sunday morning, we got up early, packed a picnic and plenty of water and headed to Rocks State Park.

There were several quest levels to choose from and we chose moderate. It was a good decision. Rocks turned out to be the perfect quest for us.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, Gabe isn't particularly fond of hiking. Part of this is because he'd rather be in the air conditioning drawing dinosaur field guides or watching re-runs of Shark Week. But Gabe also has some balance issues and he struggles a bit with uneven ground.

This quest was a manageable challenge for him.

Our mission was to follow instructions and a map to four markers. The markers were topped with metal plates for us to make a rubbing of in our passport book.

It took us about an hour.

We spent at least another hour exploring and climbing around the rock formations.

The boys loved this one. It's called Gator Rock, for obvious reasons. They immediately wanted a picture of themselves in the "mouth."

But it was the largest formation that was their favorite. It's called the King and Queen's Seat and was once a ceremonial site for the Susquehannock Indians. I can see why, it's pretty spectacular. Located near the top of the ridge, the formation itself is190 feet tall. The trail we used to reach it, came down from the top. The boys are maybe five feet off the ground in this shot.

After the above photo, the we climbed down and then back up to where you see people in the background. The drop off where the farthest man is standing turned my knees to Jell-o.

The view was amazing.

Park Quest #3 completed and a favorite hiking/climbing place found.