Pausing for a Trundle

We went for an afternoon walk on Christmas day in the backcountry of the ranch, and the world was green and shining. We ascended steep dirt roads, climbed up to the place where rainwater pools in a sandstone basin, strolled down through grassy fields. Pi exuberantly bounded off into the distance with his usual canine exuberance, frolicking, and we too felt exhilarated, in a more subdued human way. There were five of us, and we walked in different combinations, picking up bits of conversation and letting them drift off, sometimes a trio, sometimes two friends, and once I was solo, having found myself far enough ahead that I stood and waited for the others, listening to the quiet, which was somehow both vast and companionable.

I eventually turned back to find that my friends had gathered for a rock-roll. One of the lads (because it is, after all, a guy kind of thing) had dislodged a hefty sandstone rock from the edge of a grassy slope and was about to let it go for a long roll down into the open field below.We watched, riveted, as it traveled on and on, sometimes bouncing, then resuming speed, rolling further, giving another little jump, sending off a few broken fragments of itself, and finally spinning to a stop far below. We laughed, then immediately looked around for other prospects.

This was not the first time I had encountered this particular pastime. Monte and I were “serious” bike riders for many years, riding off-road with friends in the days when mountain bikes were still a novelty and the great outdoors seemed like our secret playground. I witnessed many episodes of rock rolling back then, during which otherwise grown-up men would make it their mission to set a rock rolling down a long steep slope. The object was distance, I think, how far would it travel. But there were other rewards, too: the fragrance of the chaparral as the rock crashed through brush and over grass, the unexpected quirks and comical bounces in its journey. It's hard to explain why this is so appealing.

A couple of years ago we were reminiscing about this activity with a friend of ours who is (among other things) a well-known mountain climber. “Rock rolling?” he said, with some surprise. “We call it trundling. I thought it was something only climbers did.” He proceeded to share some trundling tales of his own and we bikers and climbers found we weren't so different.

Rock rolling is an activity that cuts across all arbitrary boundaries. It really doesn’t matter what you originally set out to do; it is a fun diversion that occurs when the opportunity presents itself. Maybe it's like surfing in that way: Conditions have to be just so, and you have to be lucky enough to find yourself there. But maybe back in prehistoric times, when folks had a more direct daily relationship with their terrain and all the elements, guys would wander from their caves to the local gorge and gather for a good shove and guffaw. I happen to know, in fact, that geologists and surveyors were rolling rocks in our local mountains more than a century ago. The following documentation was taken directly from Up and Down California 1860-1864, The Journal of William H. Brewer. The day was April 23, 1861, the location, an encampment at San Luis Obispo. Here’s what Brewer wrote:

"Each mountain ascent has something peculiarly its own to distinguish it from the others. The feature of that day’s trip was the unpoetic one of rolling rocks down the slope. Nature seemed to have made it for that – a smooth, grassy slope, with few obstructions on it, and plenty of rocks at the right place near the top. We could start them, they would go about six hundred to nine hundred feet at an angle of 45 or 50 degrees, then roll down a slope of 25 to 30 degrees, going a mile from their starting place and falling probably nearly 2,000 feet. Their velocity was incredible. As they would roll, large angular fragments bounding in immense leaps through the air, they would whistle like cannon balls. We could hear them whistle half a mile! Their leaps would surpass belief. After rolling many, I went down to the foot of the first slope to see them come by – Guirado starting them. Some came within thirty feet of me; their whistling exceeded my belief. They would leap through the air on meeting slight obstructions – pieces flying off would fly a hundred feet in the air, whistling like bullets. One stone of over a hundred pounds leaped close to me. I measured the leap; it was 60 feet! Another, much larger, perhaps 400 pounds, came thundering down, struck a flat stone bedded flat in the soil, which it crushed into a thousand pieces, then bounded 100 feet, and then took its straight course down the slope.”

But maybe a disclaimer is in order before I go further. When I decided to write this blog post, I googled “trundling” as a matter of curiosity, and guess what? It is, like so many fun things, potentially dangerous, and in many places illegal. Often cited is the tragic story of a hiker in a national park who was killed by an unexpected granite boulder landing on his head. Hello? In this case, the rock roller had set a rather large and heavy rock in motion through an area that was poorly visible to him and where people and animals were likely to be. So don’t do this. Okay? Don’t hurl a bottle into a crowd, either, or drive a truck 90 miles an hour through a schoolyard filled with children playing. Common sense is a good thing. It keeps us alive and we like it.

Back to us, where we linger at the hillside on a luminous day at the ranch, as gleeful as ten-year-olds. I decide to give trundling a try myself, my chosen rock relatively compact but with good heft. Conditions are perfect, view clear and open, and it looks like it will be a steady downhill tumble onto a wide grassy field below. I drop the rock. It’s a giddy release, a sense of setting something in motion that takes on a life of its own, a little like parenting but without the emotional investment. I watch my rock speed ahead, then meander a bit, pick up a spurt of velocity, spray a few sandstone pebbles into the air, and finally roll to a stop in the distance. The day is bright, we’re being silly, and it’s fun.