Montana, The Rock Game

Montana is fairly spectacular.  I visited with five of my fraternity brothers from Dartmouth this past week.  No one lives there.  It is as unpopulated as Alaska, and just as beautiful.  It has been called the last frontier.  We flew into Bozeman and drove an hour to our condo in Big Sky.  While driving we nearly ran into a mountain goat, which we thought was either a bear or a mountain lion until we got close enough to identify it.  This goat was freaking huge.  We hiked eight miles up a mountain the first day.  It was beautiful, but about as bad of an idea as signing Turkoglu.  Four miles straight up a mountain?  I'm 6'3 and weigh 200 pounds; the hike was made for smaller people.  But the views from up there were amazing.  We fly fished the next day, the entire next day.  We were on the Madison River from 9am till 6pm.  Everywhere you looked basically was a postcard.  We were up in the mountains fly fishing, catching the most beautiful rainbow trouts I have ever seen.  

The third day we played The Rock Game.  Now this is a fantastic idea.  Basically, you put a rock on top of an empty beer can and stand about 20 yards away.  Everyone throws rocks at the can and the first to hit the target gets to choose who shotguns the next beer.  The big winner then sets up the next target.  It's brilliant in its simplicity.  As the game progresses, the targets become more intricate and the rules can be tweaked.  The last formation of The Rock Game involved three cans, and if you knocked over one of the cans but failed to knock over all three, you had to shotgun a beer.  J-Rad made the first connection but only knocked over two of the three cans, so he was forced to shotgun.  We killed a 30 within an hour.  You have to be sure to pace yourself because you can easily throw out your arm if you are too aggressive or throw big rocks.  As one of my friends put it, "Professional baseball players throw 100 'rocks' in a day and then get five days off.  So we need to be careful."  The best thing about the rock game is its prerequisites.  All you need is beer and rocks.  And all too often, nature will provide you with half of the supplies.  If swimming backwards can be an olympic sport, I think The Rock Game should be one too.  It involves accuracy, endurance, and tolerance.  What a game.  I challenge each of you to play The Rock Game in the near future.  You're welcome.