Castle Rock State Park

The starry night sky and the unbroken silence are a welcome respite after a long day spent hiking through Castle Rock State Park. Today Esteban picked me up from Brian and Amanda’s bright and early and together we drove out to the park, where we met up with Taylor, MIT ’10 and a fellow 5Wester, and her boyfriend David, an MIT ’09 and Esteban’s old roommate from East Campus. We spent the day hiking through the woods and along the Santa Cruz Mountains, which offered some impressive vistas. We picnicked in the woods-- peanut butter and banana sandwiches, yes!-- and took some breaks to climb around some awesome rock outcrops called bosses. These outcrops, formed from Vaqueros sandstone, had impressive rounded formations and small cave-like openings (tafoni) through which we crawled. While picnicking around the hike-in campsite, we developed a healthy curiosity regarding the regular gunshots blasting not so far away. We concluded that this must have been what the ranger meant when she warned us there were a lot of "inner-city kids" at some of the sites.

Taylor and David decided to call it a day after about six miles of hiking when we returned to the car to grab our gear, so Esteban and I loaded up and toted all our camping gear another three miles along terrain that wasn’t the simplest. By the time we’d set up the tent and settled in, we’d certainly earned our evening’s peanut butter and banana sandwiches. Lying out on the picnic table afterward, Esteban even glimpsed a few shooting stars, the end of the Perseids, though I never seem to have much luck spotting shooting stars. The night sky couldn’t quite compare to Chile’s, but it was still remarkable, and there’s something special about lying under a magnificent night sky and knowing you belong: it felt good to be back in my home country, if only for a little while.