While doing ground preparation for the site of the new Lakeridge Middle School in Lake Oswego, Oregon, it was not unusual for Jacob Parker, Project Superintendent of Construction with Skanska to look at the boulders that had been dug up to see if any would be good for landscaping. What was unusual, this time, was the tan and yellow-greenish boulder that he spotted among the many basalt boulders. Using an app on his cell phone the rock was originally thought to be autunite, which contains uranium. This would not be good news for a school to have a radioactive boulder near students.
Parker notified Paul Eskeldson, District Project Manager who informed the school district and they wanted it moved off the property. Eskeldson, who had heard a lecture about erratics by Rick Thompson, president of the Lower Columbia chapter of the Ice Age Floods Institute, emailed him a photo asking if the Tualatin Ice Age Foundation might be interested in adding to their collection. Thompson in turn contacted Dr. Scott Burns, Professor of Geology at Portland State University who immediately went out to see the boulder and took Dr. Martin Streck, PSU Professor of Geology specializing in mineralogy who recognized that it was rhyolite.
Rhyolite, though native to eastern Oregon is not found west of the Cascade Mountains which makes this an extremely rare find. Research could only find one other mention of a rhyolite erratic, in Canby, Oregon, by none other than J Harlen Bretz in his The Late Pleistocene Submergence in the Columbia Valley of Oregon and Washington paper published in the October-November 1919 issue of the Journal of Geology. That erratic has been lost and it is not known if it even still exists.
Finding this new boulder where it was, offered a great educational opportunity for the students at the school. On May 17th Dr. Scott Burns, standing next to the boulder, gave a short talk in the morning and again in the afternoon about how the 2,000 pound boulder was likely deposited between 15,000 to 18,000 years ago during the Lake Missoula Floods. Each student who wanted was able to take a small broken piece as a memento.
Skanska issued a press release and invited the media, and several members of the local press came to cover the event. Over the following week the story was picked up by additional media including ABC, UPI and Newsweek giving it national exposure. But the most surprising one was when it appeared in the Borneo Bulletin giving the story international exposure.
The boulder was then carefully hoisted into a truck for transport by Brian Clopton Excavating and taken to the Tualatin Heritage Center where it was installed near several granite and feldspar erratics they had moved in the past.
Principal Schultz of Lakeridge Middle School said that even though the rock was discovered not to be a radioactive threat to students the school was very happy to have donated it so it can be on display in a place for the general public to see.