The XR185 Tree
&
Don's Rock Tree
The XR185 Tree
When Dad bought the land back in November of 1978, my friend Jason Hale and I were 13 & 12 respectively.
Back in those days, Jason & I and our two dads would camp at Brushyland most every weekend. We
both got 1979 Honda XR185 dirt bikes and we rode them into the ground. What great bikes. Mine was
originally our buddy Al Lamb's bike - he owns
Dallas Honda. But alas nothing lasts forever and these two bikes finally tuckered out. So as a
fitting (and albeit strange) tribute to these bikes I decided in February 2005 to hang them side by
side in a large tree. The tree is located very near a fun motorcycle hill-climb that Jason and I
built many moons ago called appropriately enough "Brad & Jason". I hoisted the bikes up in that tree
all by myself. Well, I did use a little muscle from our tractor and from our Jeep. I threw out some rye
grass seed as an added touch. Soon after the bikes were hung I learned that Honda was discontinuing the XR
line of bikes, perhaps adding a little more poignancy to the tree.
Don's Rock Tree
(built in honor of Don Hale)A few weeks after I completed the "XR185 Tree" in February 2005, Dad began working on a "Rock Tree" - although he had been thinking about it for quite a while. These pictures don't really do it justice - there's a rugged eloquence to it. Simple in design, complex in thought. That's a Dan Stone structure if ever there was one. It consists of three massive beams coming together to form a faceless pyramid, and it has three shelves. Dad hung a very heavy iron-ore rock in the center of the tree. The final touch was a small plaque dedicating the unique structure to Dad's good friend, Don HaleDon Hale, who passed away in March of 2004. Dad's "Rock Tree rule" states that first-time visitors should place a rock found on our land on one of its shelves or on the ground near it. After just a few years, dozens and dozens of rocks covered the shelves and the ground.
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