Intro

Remember when you threw that rock at that other rock?

A few months ago, I was at a remote trailhead in the Mojave, waiting for a friend to arrive, and after fifteen minutes of trying to hop from one randomly designated boulder to another—don’t fall into the lava!!!—I turned to what might be one of the world’s first and best sports: chucking rocks at other rocks. I started with throwing little rocks at big rocks, and then I threw rocks at the creek, and then I threw rocks at rocks in the creek, and then I threw rocks at rocks on the other side of the creek. The water was too turbulent to skip rocks off the surface, so I tried to skip rocks off rocks in the creek and hit rocks on the other side. In that last effort, I was a total failure. Or was I? Maybe I just found a couple dozen rocks that were poorly shaped for skipping off other rocks.