title: Big Black Boring Rock: Essays on Northwest Geology
author:  Stephen P. Reidel 
description: Written in the same vein as well-known author John McPhees books, Big Black Boring Rock is a collection of highly readable and witty essays that focus on the geology of the Pacific Northwest. Author Steve Reidel is a geologist with the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, and an expert on Columbia River Basalt, the primary rock of the Columbia Basin  the semi-arid region of Washington State where most of the essays are set. The book collects a series of captivating essays Reidel has been writing for more than a decade for the Tri-City Herald, the daily newspaper of the Tri-Cities (Richland, Pasco, and Kennewick), Washington. Written in plain language, Reidel makes geology, an often difficult field to understand, accessible for all readers.
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  The Riddle Of The Rocks  
  
  
    
  
  
  
  
  
  # The Riddle Of The Rocks
  
  
  ### Charles Egbert Craddock
  
  
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  THE RIDDLE OF THE ROCKS
  
  By Charles Egbert Craddock
  
  1895
  
  Upon the steep slope of a certain “bald” among the Great Smoky Mountains there
  lie, just at the verge of the strange stunted woods from which the treeless
  dome emerges to touch the clouds, two great tilted blocks of sandstone. They
  are of marked regularity of shape, as square as if hewn with a chisel. Both
  are splintered and fissured; one is broken in twain. No other rock is near.
  The earth in which they are embedded is the rich black soil not unfrequently
  found upon the summits. Nevertheless no great significance might seem to
  attach to their isolation—an outcropping of ledges, perhaps; a fracture of the
  freeze; a trace of ancient denudation by the waters of the spring in the gap,
  flowing now dow