What's So Cool About this Rock

I'm talking about that big one, close to the middle of the photo. It doesn't look like much, does it? It's an average-looking rock embedded in a wall of rock. So what?

What's amazing to me about that rock is what it's been through. Once upon a time, it eroded out of a hillside and tumbled down into a mountain stream, where it rolled around until it was smoothed over. It looks like a rock you would see in a mountain stream because that's exactly what it once was.

But here's the thing: that little rock has outlived the mountains that gave it birth. Those mountains were as vast, imposing, and seemingly eternal as the modern Rockies, but over thousands of centuries, erosion wore them down. By the time the first dinosaurs evolved, they had disappeared entirely. So, that rock in the picture was once a creek rock in a mountain range that eroded away 250 million years ago. The mountains have been gone for more years than you could count in a decade, and it's still there, watching the centuries fly by the way we watch minutes. That's what's so cool about that rock.