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The original was posted on /r/nosleep by /u/Jughead_J0nes on 2024-11-27 04:43:05+00:00.
I hate the name. I hate it, I hate it, I hate it. Because that place is unnatural, dangerous, and it makes my stomach turn just thinking about it. And nobody takes me seriously, because it’s called Cock fucking Rock.
Officially it doesn’t have a name, it’s just a structure that’s part of a lava field plateau outside a city in Utah. I’m being vague so people don’t go looking. I only mention Utah to let people know that if you go hiking off the marked trails there, you’re in danger. I grew up in this area. At some point someone’s dad’s dad went hiking on the plateau and found a rock formation that looked like, well, a giant dick. The name Cock Rock was inevitable. The cherry on top was the fact that Cock Rock has a cave opening on the tip which is much taller than it is wide. There’s a lot of natural lava tunnels out there. So on the head of Cock Rock lies Dick Slit cave. Poetry. I guess high schoolers have changed surprisingly little since the 60’s.
Visiting Cock Rock is a fairly popular thing to do in my high school, mostly for the juniors and seniors. It’s about an hour away so it’s not an insanely popular spot, but there’s not a ton to do out here so you can usually expect to hear a couple people at least talking about going down there on the weekend.
The other reason for its local infamy are the disappearances. Once every couple years or so some senior heads out to Cock Rock and never comes back. The park service usually says they either got too drunk and wandered off, or they got too drunk and slipped in the cave for the animals to find. People wandering off the trails and dying of exposure or thirst (or one of the other million things that’ll kill you in nature) is not entirely uncommon, as sad as it is, but this place is different. Cock Rock has a mysterious reputation mostly because they’ve never recovered any of the bodies. I know why, now.
I’m a junior in high school along with my best friend Mac. Mac and I were always an unlikely pair, at least to me. I was always more of the poetry dork that guys like Mac pick on, while Mac was your classic wannabe class clown. Back in elementary school Mac lost his friend group, he said the assholes just didn’t like him anymore one day. That’s elementary kids for you I guess. Anyway, that’s when Mac and I started hanging out. Our dynamic was always that he’d go over the top, and I’d try to reel him in, while he’d do his best to bring me out of my shell.
Mac and I were born here, and have heard every local legend there is. Cock Rock was always our favorite, especially once we were old enough to start smoking weed. It was always an inside joke that at some point in the night, someone would suggest going there. Last week we finally decided to do it. We had a long weekend and decided to take advantage and visit the famed spot. Both of our parents are pretty strict so we told them we were staying at each other's houses, something we did pretty often, and hit the road.
The drive out was uneventful. We had a little trouble finding the exact spot, google maps is weird when there aren’t many real roads, but besides that we found the trailhead without issue. It’s not a real trailhead, it looks like an animal path more than anything, but landmarks described by past visitors told us we were going the right way.
The first weird thing we noticed was a lack of other people. Mac theorized that it was because it was a Thursday. I was worried it was because Cock Rock wasn’t actually as cool as it was hyped up to be. Even if it wasn’t, I was happy to have the spot to ourselves.
My worries went away when we caught our first glance of the rock. It was, in fact, a giant rock shaped like a dick. Giggling through the last leg of our hike, we made it up to the rock. The “tip” showed the most signs of life, beer cans, cigarette butts, really shitty spray paint, the classic accoutrement you see at a high school hangout where nobody’s forced to clean up.
Mac and I did our civic duty and added to the trash, pulling the beers and ciders we stole from our parents fridge out of our backpacks. They were all about room temperature at that point but hey, alcohol is alcohol to a teenager.
We hung out for a bit, drinking, smoking, and cracking jokes. We theorized about how the rock got its shape, with my favorite take of the night being Mac’s idea that Paul Bunion got leprosy. After the first few beers were added to the ground, we shulked our jackets to reveal the white shirts we coordinated earlier. We took turns shooting videos of each other jumping out of Dick Slit cave, squirming in the air like tadpoles and doing our best over the top hentai impressions. It was fucking hilarious at the time.
Once we were satisfied with our collection of videos Mac had the idea of exploring deeper into the cave. Let me be clear, yes we were both decently drunk and very high, but I know what I saw. This was real. I’ve seen shit on drugs before and I can tell the fucking difference. If the substances were responsible for anything, it’d be the dumb fuck decision to go into the cave.
I was nervous about it. I grew up hearing stories about tourists or drunk teens wandering off into caves only to have their bodies drug out days later. I could hear my Dad bitching about “wasting taxes on recovering idiots” in my head, and I really didn’t want to be one of the idiots in question. Mac grew up hearing those stories too, but he was always one of those guys who thinks it’ll never happen to him. We went back and forth for a while. It was pretty late at this point and I was thinking of heading back anyway, while Mac wanted to cap off the night with some spelunking.
Eventually he said “Fine dude, stay out here if you want but I’m going in”.
Some variation of that line always gets me. I wish I had more of a spine. Even if I still lost Mac, if I had stayed out of the cave I wouldn’t have seen that evil. That sounds nice now but I know I would never have let him wander in alone.
We went in. Admittedly, it’s a cool cave. The lava rock gives the walls a weird texture, a kind of rough and pocked wavy shape, and the cave itself kept its shape for the most part. About 8 feet tall and 3 feet wide, just enough for us to comfortably squeeze past each other. It was only a few steps in before we left the moonlight behind and had to use our phone flashlights. It was probably a good thing we had no reception because both of our batteries were relatively full. My half-rule was to turn back as soon as we couldn’t see the cave entrance anymore, but Mac insisted that since it was so dark out it didn’t count when we lost sight of the entrance a few yards in.
Not too far after that we hit what I thought was the end of the cave. It made sense that the inside of Cock Rock was never really of note if it’s only a gentle slope that ends after 20 yards or so. I was glad for the excuse to turn back, about as much as Mac was disappointed. I had already taken the first few steps back to fresh air when Mac’s voice rang out behind me.
“Dude! There’s more!”
I turned around to see Mac laying on his stomach, his phone disappearing into a hole in the back of the cave wall. Someone had tried to block it with a large rock which Mac was in the process of pushing away. When the hole was clear it was, to my frustration, slightly bigger than Mac or me, and before I could protest again Mac was shimming his way in. I didn’t like the look of it. The holes' edges were smoother than you’d expect, and covered in ridges like it was made of fabric instead of stone. Another clear sign to me that we were in over our heads.
“I don’t want to have to pull you out if you get stuck.” I said
Mac just kept disappearing into the squeeze.
“No way man, there’s plenty of room, and I feel air! If it blows it goes!”
Mac took a break from crawling to laugh at the old cavers idiom. There’s enough spelunkers in our town that everyone knows it, even the people like me who make a habit of staying out of caves. The line “if it blows it goes” means that if you feel airflow on the other side of an opening, it’s probably safe to explore. At that moment I cursed whoever came up with the saying for stacking yet another dick joke on a night that was making me seriously uncomfortable.
Mac went through, and shouted encouragement from the other side, promising me that the cave opened up again after ten feet or so.
I knew we shouldn’t have gone farther, but Mac just kept driving us forward. I don’t know if he was distracted by his excitement or was just ignoring my pleas for him to at least slow down. I think he was equally as amazed as I was scared.
I crawled in. As much as I didn’t want to, I couldn’t leave Mac by himself. I almost wanted to let his dumbass-ary catch up with him, but if he slipped or got stuck on his own it could easily mean death, and I wasn’t willing to let that happen.
As I army crawled through the squeeze I realized Mac was right, there was airflow. Weirdly enough it felt warm, and almost humid. I would expect that any air in the cave would be kept cool. Waves of the warm air seemed to push on my face with every forward jolt of my awkward movement. Sure enough, after 10 feet or so I was through, and as I scrambled to my feet I saw an excited Mac already making more progress. I caught up to him and we kept walking deeper.
The cave was almost the same on the other side of the squeeze. The walls and floor maybe looked a little sharper, like this portion had no...
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