Missouri has beautiful state parks.

I will be the first one to tell you that I am definitely not an outdoorsy nature person. It's my fear of bugs that turns me off from most of nature. But I have this friend who loves nature and I agreed to go on this 8.5 mile hike with her.

We woke up super early on a Saturday morning and headed over to the Gans Creek Recreation Area, which is across the street from Rock Bridge State Park (where we usually go, because Devil's Ice Box is there). It was so pretty!

We stopped at a rock/cliff thing overlooking the forest (pictured above) to eat our peanut butter and jelly sandwiches for lunch. After we finished we decided to go off-trail and climbed down the rock/cliff, which was way steeper than it looked, and we followed the creek.


We hadn't gone very far when we noticed this rock stack. It was a stack of several flat rocks, with big ones at the bottom and smaller ones at the top so it looked like a pyramid. We were basically like, 'oh that's pretty cool,' and kept going. Only a few yards later there was another one. I'm no expert, but I really don't think there's anyway these could have occurred naturally so someone (human, robot, monster?) must have made them. We decided they were a map so we kept going to see when they went.

There were a lot of these rock stacks and we followed them for a long time. Along the way I knocked one down and I thought for a second the gods were going to strike me down for ruining one of their sacred rock stacks. But I guess not because my friend and I made it out alive. Eventually we ended up at this awesome alcove!

The alcove from the outside looking in.

The alcove from the inside looking out.

We deemed it our new hangout and started making plans to turn it into our secret fort. It's just too bad it was at least half way into this hike (somewhere around 4 miles in). After we left the alcove we went back onto the trail to conclude the hike.

Close to the end, we found another overlook, which would have been even better than the last one to eat lunch at, and sat for awhile to take in the view.

Both my friend and I have been through scary movie training, which consists of things like watching a lot of them to see what works and what doesn't and running through the woods without tripping, so I think that's probably what got us out of the woods safely. The forest creatures know better than to mess with us.