The Boulder

When I first moved to my city I saw a rock high above the city. In the picture below you can see it just above the telephone poles. I've been here over a year; the exact location has confounded me the entire time. My city is very hilly and the hills can mess with your head and alter your perspective. I wanted to see this rock up close and personal but it wasn't until this summer that I got enough info to start tracking it down.
My co-worker's son graduated from the local high school in June. She mentioned a few of the year-end activities and said the students had also painted "the boulder". "The boulder?" I asked. My co-worker told me that it's the boulder you can see from the center of town and that it's a tradition for graduating high school classes to paint it. Aha!

My detective work lead me to think it was this boulder (below) but I pass it at least every day and never have I seen it painted.

Then I thought maybe it was the local bar (below). But obviously it wasn't. I interrogated my co-worker a bit more and she told me the boulder in the center of town broke off from the boulder that keeps watch over our city. Eureka! I knew which one she meant but I couldn't work out how to get up there.
Fast-forward to this October. On a hike through the local state forest another hiker kindly explained exactly how to find the boulder. Or rather he told me the street name that dead ends on the path leading to the boulder. My city isn't that big; it wasn't that hard to figure the rest out. I found the path on Halloween. It was a pretty gloomy day - cloudy, misty and very very windy. The path was kind of hard to follow because of all the downed trees from last year's ice storm and the massive amounts of leaves covering the path.
The path wasn't very long and really, all I had to do was keep watch for the graffiti and I would have found it eventually.
I actually walked right by the boulder without realizing it. At the end of the path is a defunct rock quarry that has been taken over by high school students and graffiti artists.
It's a little hard to tell from these pictures that I am about 1000' above the city. It was really windy and misty so the perspective got a little skewed.
The rock quarry was cool but I had to back track to find the boulder. It's painted red and visible throughout the city.
It says "FHS 10" for the current senior high school class. There must be a 100+ layers of paint! My co-worker told me that every class paints the boulder. There wasn't as much trash as I would have expected and certainly not the kind of trash I expected. I saw mostly water bottles and paint trays. I had expected to see a lot more beer detritus. I suppose if you're going to wander through the woods in the middle of the night to paint a rock you want to be sober . . .
The views from the top were pretty amazing. From the top my city looked like such a quaint New England city, an ideal that is very far from what it actually is. If the weather is better next weekend I might return for some more pictures. I don't think it will be wise to tromp through the snow and sleet just to get some nice views.