Special to The SunBreak by John Hieger

Seattle lifers are experts on the random nooks and crannies of the neighborhoods they grew up driving around as shady teenagers. After a painful route running session on the luxurious Roosevelt High School practice field this week my friend, a Lake City lifer, asked if I wanted to see “the biggest rock ever”?

My inner, misguided nerd shot back, “Ayers Rock is in Australia.”

“It’s like five blocks away, let’s check it.”

So off we drove, me skeptical, him with an amused grin.  

Sure enough, around a random corner (28th Avenue NE, near NE 72nd Street) in one of those typical Ravenna/Wedgwood single-family neighborhoods sits the Wedgwood Rock, the biggest-ass boulder I’d never heard of. I was expecting something children could crawl on, but this thing could crush a school bus. You expect to see old Volvo station wagons in Wedgwood, not huge volcanic stones dropped from the last ice age 14,000 years ago.

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“What did I say, bro? It’s huge,” my friend boasted.

I was impressed. “Why wasn’t I told about this?”

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If I were in a boring indie band, I’d write songs about weird things like this to mix it up bit. The Duchess and the Duke have a song about Reservoir Park and that’s like a tenth as cool as this behemoth! Why wasn’t the Wedgwood Rock on Queensryche’s radar when they were desperate for inspiration on their last album?

From indigenous natives to hippies, this glacial erratic (word for big stones dropped by glaciers) has been drawing folks to Wedgwood for as long as people have been enamored by big things. The boulder is a unique and impressive reminder of our city’s geologic past. You can’t help but smile knowing this corner of Seattle has been rocking locals longer than The Central Saloon.  

If you’ve never seen it, it’s worth a slow drive-by at the very least.