Somebody's gonna win...

So, this last Saturday I got up bright and early (5:50 am, well before any person should ever get out of bed), and headed down to Monroe, Utah with one of the geology professors to help collect some rocks. Apparently this area had been incorrectly labeled as bedrock on a map when it appeared to be glacial till. The purpose of the trip was to collect samples from some of the rocks to see if they could be cosmogenically dated to determine the age of maximum glacial extent. We went down to Monroe, rode the department ATVs up the road and stopped at the moraine to search for rocks. When we found rocks that were good specimens to sample, we had to beat the rocks with a hammer to try and get about 1 kilogram of sample from the top of the rock. As it turns out, one of the rocks I found was very hard. We pounded on it for probably two hours and made very little progress. When asked about a half an hour in how I was doing, I just said, "Well, at some point either the rock will win or I will." We did eventually get a fair amount of peices off after we were about to give up. We did have quite a few laughs on the trip from several situations which I won't recount. I guess the takeaway message is if you pound on a rock with a hammer long enough, you will eventually get it to break.