Day 35 April 8

April 8

Happy Easter!

Inside the "new" church St Mary's Fredricksburg, TX

Outside front of the church.

The plan inside of the original church.

Original church, with the much bigger newer church next door.

We attended a Saint Mary's church in historic downtown Fredericksburg this morning. It was built in the early 1900's with locally quarried limestone. Many of the other buildings in the area were also built with the same stone. The bigger church that we attended was added next door to the smaller church that was built by German settlers in the 1860's.

Jane hugs a cactus, don't know why.

Enchanted Rock seen from a distance.

Notice the lighter band of rock?  The rock must have cracked after it was hardened and fresh magma entered the crack cooling quickly making a band of fined grained granite.

This picture was taken to show the scale of the rock structure.

Jane is standing on a fined grained band of granite that shows the rock split after it had cooled slowly.  The rock is mostly very coarse grained pink granite that cooled very slowly underground.

Life tries to exist everywhere, this is a little oasis that formed in a depression in the rock.  It took thousands of years to form.

In the afternoon, we visited Enchanted Rock State Park. Enchanted Rock is a huge pink granite expansion dome. It is the 2nd largest formation of this type in the US. It was formed a billion years ago when a bubble of hot magma was pushed up into the earth's crust. It cooled very slowly forming granite. Over millions of years, the surrounding limestone rock (softer and weaker) eroded away, exposing the granite. The exposed rock we could see is just a small part of of the whole formation. All over the surface, you can see pieces of the dome "shedding" a process called exfoliation. The pink color is from the feldspar in the rock.  The structure is called a batholith.   There are veins of fine grained granite visible, and areas of erosion that have allowed vernal pools to form.