The T's Go Camping

For the last year now I have had a hankering to go camping.  No, not as long as I've had a hankering to eat blue gill, but long.  With summer two years ago moving to St Louis, getting adjusted to life and seminary, and then last summer being in summer Hebrew, there was just no time.  

So Kathee asked Karl to bring down our camping stuff from his garage which allows us to go camping this last summer before I graduate.  I am taking one class this summer, a two week class at the end of July called Spirit, Church, and Last Things.  Aside from that, I have tons of reading, studying, and other things to be doing.  

However, with camping stuff in hand, dates of camping decided, and inventory of said supplied complete, the only thing left was to determine where.  So after many an hour of going over websites to decide, I ended up texting my friend Craig about good camping spots within an hour or so from St Louis.  He texted back with a couple, so we chose Johnsons Shut Ins.  It is part of the Ozark Mountains, specifically in the St Francois Mountains.  

Here is the cut and pasted definition from the state park's website defining what a shut in is (because before this trip I thought they were elderly church people who are unable to attend church regularly).

The park is named after the "shut-ins" where the rushing waters of the East Fork of the Black River are "shut-in" by the hard volcanic rock. Over 1.4 billion years ago, violent volcanic eruptions created hard rhyolite bedrock forming the knobby shapes of the St. Francois Mountains. As the rhyolite cooled, it cracked in many places, creating pathways for flowing water. Over millions of years, water eroded the cracks into narrow channels. Scoured by water-born sand and gravel, the channels grew deeper and wider. The eroding action of water continues to shape these rocks into the potholes, the plunge pools below small waterfalls, and the chutes that form wild, natural waterslides that delight visitors today.

Also of note, this park was flooded in 2005 by 1.3 billion gallons of water that came cascading down due to a breach of a hydroelectric power station from a reservoir on a neighboring mountain.  We wondered why there were tons (literally and metaphorically) rocks bigger than our van sitting in the field in front of the interpretative center.  Very interesting.  

Lastly, today before we left, we went to Taum Sauk Mountain State Park, which was nearby, to check out their camp grounds (publicized as "rustic") and to go to the highest elevation in Missouri.  We ate a picnic on top of the mountain, went to the plague that proved so, and came home.  We had a blast!