Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Squared boulders

On a recent backpacking trip I noticed an area that had a few square rocks sitting on the ground. As I went to go look at them I continued to find others of various sizes. Some half buried others just barely showing. I did not find anything else like it other than in this particular spot.

My question is, would rocks occur naturally like this? For size reference, this rock was about 3 feet long. (Had to shrink picture to attach file).

Look like remnants of a quarry, that doesn't happen naturally on all sides.

This is along the lines of what I was thinking. I can't imagine what it would have been like getting these out of there, even with animals.

Also could have been cut/placed as property markers, many moons ago....but they didn't naturally occur IMO.

Yes, they form naturally. I've seen them and picked up a few, still got one around here somewhere. It's called "jointing" and you can observe it in outcrops at road cuts. It results from rocks being compressed and deformed and forming fractures that are oriented along planes parallel to each other. To get square rocks you need three sets of parallel fracture planes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joint_(geology)


Can't get the link to work but you can easily search up "joints in rocks."

Absolutely 100% could be naturally occurring. Rocks get sheared in seismic events over millions of years, and depending on the mineral content, many rocks/minerals have cubic fracture planes. If it was quarried, you would likely see drill or chisel marks on the faces.

Probably came from formations like this:

Those are columnar basalts, formed by a different process; lava flows cooling.

Those fractures tend to be hexagonal, and oriented vertically.

There is a community near Dallas, known as Rockwall. It is called Rockwall because someone long ago dug in the area and found what was thought to be a wall built of stone by human hands which encompassed a large area. The consensus these days, after a certain amount of excavation is that it is a natural rock formation.