Balancing Rocks

A few years ago, a friend of mine was taking a film class at Cornell.  At the end of the semester, the class had a showing of the short films that they'd produced.  There are two films that I remember...one, not just because it was my friend's film, but also because it was really good, and the other, a documentary about something I'd never noticed before but haven't been able to help noticing ever since.  The documentary was about a gentleman who goes around the Ithaca area balancing rocks on top of one another.

When I was at the Lab of Ornithology last weekend, I couldn't help noticing the balanced rocks to the side of the trail, and the more I looked for them, the more I found them.  

The balancing of rocks isn't as easy as it looks...it takes careful practice to find the center of gravity and keep the rock settled despite its sometimes jagged edges.

The documentary interviewed the retired Cornell professor who does this, and it's obviously more than just a hobby for him...it has a spiritual dimension as well.

I've never tried balancing rocks myself, but maybe I should sometime...just because.

The balanced rocks were everywhere, and the configurations were as varied as their settings.  Here are a few more shots...

How Did These Rocks Get Here?

In front of my porch, I have a small planting area for flowers.  Ringing the planting area is a row of rocks, some of which may have been found in the yard, but many of which likely weren't.  Now, it's been quite a while since I learned how to identify rocks, but I know that most of the bedrock around here is composed of Devonian shale (the famous Marcellus Shale), a sedimentary rock that formed when central New York was the bed of a shallow inland sea.  But of the rocks in front of my porch, many of them look to be metamorphic, with embedded specks of darker material or ripples or waves of color, as in the rock pictured above.  One of them is a red sandstone...there's nothing like that around here.  My guess is that a previous owner of the property was something of a rock hound, collecting unique rocks from across the area.  These metamorphic rocks, and maybe even the sandstone, may be found in central New York, but they would have been transported here by glaciers...they're known as glacial erratics.  The fact that they were carried by glaciers, then likely deposited in runoff channels, explains their highly smoothed appearance.  It might be neat, once the snow clears up and I get a good look at them again, to find out exactly what kind of rocks they are and where they might have come from.