When planning our not-quite-direct drive to Dallas, I figured we’d have time for one Missouri state park on the morning of April 6, before heading west and south slightly into Arkansas for the night. But which one in SE Mo.?
Such excellent names: Taum Sauk Mountain State Park, Johnson’s Shut-Ins State Park and Elephant Rocks State Park. In the end, we went with Elephant Rocks, and on a Saturday, the place was popular but not overrun. Mostly, I figure, day-trippers from St. Louis out with their small children and dogs, all of whom need walking (as I can attest from experience). The park also offered the open-air pleasures of picnicking, especially on a warm spring day ahead of full-blown mosquito season, in which we ourselves partook.
A mile’s worth of paved path snakes among ancient granite boulders. At only about 133 acres, the park is small. Even so, out in the field of boulders, the park didn’t seem so crowded.
Time, geologic uplift and millions of years of erosion produced the boulders, and — I learned — the area counts as a tor.
“The landform is called a ‘tor,’ a stack or pile of spheroidally weathered residual granite rock boulders sitting atop a bedrock mass of the same rock,” says an excellent brochure produced by Missouri State Parks that provides brief but informative descriptions of the park and its history.
“While tors exist elsewhere in the United States and worldwide, they are not abundant anywhere. Elephant Rocks is Missouri’s finest tor and one of the best examples in the Midwest.”
That just makes my day, finding out that I visited a fine tor. Seriously. I didn’t even know there was a geologic definition. Big, rocky hill is how I’d have defined it. I’ve known about tors since the moment I slapped my head upon realizing I could have visited Glastonbury Tor, but didn’t.
People go on about sunsets and views of the ocean and mountain vistas, but human beings are also pretty fond of impressive rocks. Some of us travel a good ways to see them. 
Some fat man’s misery paths.
“Just outside the park is the oldest recorded commercial granite quarry in the state, producing fine red granite called ‘Missouri Red,’ the brochure says. This quarry, opened in 1869, furnished facing stone for the Eads Bridge piers standing on the Mississippi River levee in St. Louis.”
Cool. A quarry needed a railroad spur, and even a small railroad needed a building for locomotive maintenance. The ruin of such a building stands in the park.
It’s had the benefit of some reconstruction, would be my guess. It certainly looked sturdy enough that I didn’t think that rock was going to tumble on my head.
Must be Missouri Red. Why wouldn’t you built it using the stone you had at hand? Good old Missouri Red, which sounds like a dime novel character or a strain of cannabis.