There Be Rocks in the Frontyard, Captain

After a scorching dirt-filled attack on the fishpond Saturday, Seth unwittingly stepped up to the Alter of Punishment for our Sunday of rock rolling. There's no good perspective on how big these mother-loving boulders were, but here's a shot of Seth, Di, and me sitting on the largest (and Owen sitting on one of the *8* smaller ones). The rock store estimated the largest at 2500lbs. With Seth and Matt on pry bars, and Di on the much scarier job of leverage rocks underneath, we were able to move it about 8 feet in 20 minutes...

Once we figured out how to really properly use our collective physics lessons, we made much better progress. The rock, being a semi-regular hexagon of basalt, essentially "rolled" into the backyard. Except rolling it was like trying to get a napping 2500lb tiger to get off the roof of your car without ruining your car or getting killed by the now-annoyed feline. Sometimes we got a lucky bounce and were able to roll it two or three edges at a time. But we still had the Bridge of Lucridity (Ludicrousness?) to traverse.

There was some additional dirt to remove for Deck II, so Seth took some swings on the dirt-crete we have in the summer, and made short order of it. After hauling as much dirt as we could out of the yard, we took the trailer over to unload, and bought back 3 yards of crushed rock to lay in the Deck II hole to make a bridge for the enormous boulder. We still weren't sure how well that would work. Without the dirt to use for pry-bar leverage, we used leftover wall rock as fulcrum points and finally got the biggest boulder into place at about 2pm (we'd been pushing, pulling, cajoling, swearing at it since about 8am).



The boards under the rock along the gravel were an inspired idea of Seth's. I really think that helped us stay on the path and move more quickly over the gravel.

The smaller rocks are now in a pile in the backyard but the largest boulder is now in place. We have some fine-tuning to do, but we can now proceed to work on both Deck II and the fish pond at the same time.
More pics here.