Oct. 14—PULLMAN — Noah Dunham stared straight ahead, a blank look on his face. Washington State's center looked confused.
"A rivalry rock?" Dunham said.
Turns out, Dunham hadn't yet heard of the latest addition to the Washington State and Oregon State football series, which is set to play installment No. 112 on Saturday afternoon in Corvallis. The Cougars and Beavers have played almost every year since 1903, making this one of the longest-running series in college football, an annual battle between two Pac-12 legacy schools for bragging rights.
This weekend, though, that's not the only thing WSU and OSU will be competing for. Thanks to the work of a few alumni association members from both schools, they will be playing for a new rivalry rock, a two-part formation, the top half glossy basalt and the bottom half white granite, potentially as old as 100 million years. Totaling about 50 pounds, the stones hail from a place called Biggs Junction, an unincorporated community in northern Oregon along the Columbia River — in fact, just about halfway between Corvallis' Reser Stadium and Pullman's Gesa Field, the programs' football stadiums.
The rock formation doesn't have a name yet, and it isn't official in the way most rivalry trophies are, meaning the winner of Saturday's game won't hoist it at midfield. In the rock's debut year, it's likely to find a home in the winner's alumni association building, underscoring the fact that for now, it's more of an alumni and fan-sponsored push than a school-sanctioned tradition. Those who made it possible hope it becomes more official in the years ahead.
For now, though, it's just that: a rivalry rock. It's made from the land that surrounds both WSU and OSU, a nod to the Pacific Northwest background in which both schools find some level of identity. The brains behind the operation, WSU grad Jesse Lyon and Oregon State grad Ian Madin, were hoping to unveil it last year, but they decided against it while both schools remained in limbo ahead of the rebuilt Pac-12's launch this year.
Now it's here in all its glory.
"It's really quite thrilling," said Madin, a 1986 master's graduate from OSU and the geologist who helped cut the rocks into shape. "I had sort of forgotten about it. I've heard things for a long time, and I've got a whole bunch of other things, irons in the fire and stuff. So when I got a little note from Jesse the other day, I was kinda like, 'Oh, that's so cool!' I'm really excited to see how that goes."
***
One summer afternoon last year, Lyons was sitting on his porch in Portland, where he's found a home after graduating from WSU in 1992. He was pondering the WSU/OSU series, what it means for both schools, how it could look in the future as the reimagined Pac-12 took shape.
What ties these schools together? Lyons thought.
So he headed online and began doing some research, looking into rivalry trophies around the country: The most iconic, like the axe for the winner of the Stanford/Cal matchup, to the most peculiar, like the Iron Skillet for the victor between rivals TCU and SMU. As Lyons looked further into the issue, he realized that some of these trophies didn't start out as school-sponsored initiatives. Some started organically, between fans, before flourishing as official trophies years down the road.
Well, Lyons began to think, why wouldn't that be possible for WSU and OSU? So he dove deeper into his research, trying to think what would make a good rivalry trophy, something that embodies both institutions. He considered centering it around the schools' land grant identities. It sounded good, he thought, but agriculture only accounts for a fraction of what students at each school study. Besides, lots of universities around the country are land-grant, not just WSU and OSU. He wanted something more exclusive to the Cougs and Beavs.
Then, after sifting through a couple other ideas he didn't love, he came to a realization. Lyons grew up in the Spokane area, where in social studies and geology classes, schoolchildren always learn about one key feature about their area.
"Oh," Lyons said to himself, like the idea should have been obvious all along. "The Missoula floods."
The Missoula floods, Lyons realized, went beyond just their basic meaning. The floods, a sequence of devastating deluges caused by glacial lake outbursts that swept across the Pacific Northwest about 14,000 years ago, shaped much of the area into the way it looks today. They didn't just wipe out much of Eastern Washington. They also did the same to the Corvallis area.
That's about when Lyons felt the idea gaining traction. Tens of thousands of years ago, WSU and OSU were victims of a catastrophe. Three years ago, they suffered another unfortunate fate, left behind as the Pac-12 Conference imploded around them, leaving only the Cougars and Beavers in the league. The parallels hit Lyons like a Mack truck.
"So I'm like, wouldn't that be cool to do something around that?" Lyons said. "So I started kinda playing around with the idea that there could be something with the two survivors of these terrible events."
Lyons then contacted the Pacific Northwest Sculptors, an arts organization based in Portland. He passed along his idea, and the organization responded by connecting Lyons with Madin, a retired geologist who lives in Lake Oswego, a nearby suburb. Madin, it turns out, had been doing art for the past six years or so, and he had never done a commissioned piece. This would be his first big piece, a work for an organization, not for a neighbor or a friend.
"I was just kinda like, oh, this is such a cool opportunity," Madin added. "First off, they're speaking my language because they want these rocks that are specific to Oregon and Washington. Full disclosure, I'm not a football fan. But I went to OSU, and I've got lots of colleagues and friends from WSU, and I've been up there lots. I'm quite familiar with it, and they're both organizations that I love to be associated with."
He doesn't call himself a football fan, but he understood why such a thing could be important to WSU and OSU fans. Growing up, Madin went to the Big Game, the annual rivalry matchup between Stanford and Cal, the latter of which his father taught at. "I think that's a fun concept," Madin said, "even if I'm not particularly interested in going and watching games anymore."
So after consulting with a few officials and getting the green light from Cougs First, a business network of WSU alumni, Lyons proceeded on with the project. Before long, Lyons joined OSU alumni association member Dan Jarman at Madin's home in Lake Oswego, where his house is surrounded by a perimeter of rocks he collects, some 350 of the the stones piled up. "They're waiting their turn to go have something made out of them," Madin says.
Turns out, Madin had just the rocks that would be perfect for this project. He found a few Missoula flood erratics, boulders transported hundreds of miles by the floods. "It was kinda like, oh, this is perfect," Madin said. Then, when he found the basalt rocks that came from Biggs Junction and all three men realized the symbolism the combination would provide, they agreed: This was, in fact, perfect.
So Madin set up shop and began work on the stones in his workshop. He enlisted the help of a friend who had done similar work, much of it on Orcas Island out in San Juan County in Washington, and the two men laid out their plans. They used an iPhone app called Scaniverse to make a 3D model of the rocks, then a computer program called SketchUp for more detailed work.
Then, for about four hours per day for several months, Madin shaped the rocks into the way they look today. He used a wet grinder, an angle grinder with a water feed, to keep things cool and keep down the clouds of dust, which can accumulate and become unhealthy to be around.
He would use saw blades to take off big chunks of the granite, then move to a grinding wheel, which he used to smooth out the marks made by the saw blades. Then came the polishing pads, complete with diamond grit. Each pad is a bit finer than the last, and each one removes the scratches left by the previous one. With every step, Madin made the rocks' surface smoother and shinier.
On the piece of basalt, Madin took care to leave the texture the way he found it: One side is a fractured surface, which reminds the geologist of mountains, and the other is smoother, almost like the plains on the Palouse. "Some characteristics of both states," Madin said.
Madin also had to drill a hole in both rocks to make room for a pin that connects them, which is the way the trophy will be presented, but they're separate for transport purposes. Once that was complete, within a few months, Madin and everyone behind the operation had their finished product: A new rivalry trophy for Washington State and Oregon State.
"We're the two survivors," Lyons said. "Here's our survival trophy."
***
Several of his teammates hadn't caught wind of the rock, but don't count WSU safety Jaylen Thomas as part of that group. On Monday afternoon, when a question about the trophy came his way, a smile washed over his face.
"I actually just saw the picture," Thomas said.
Thomas is a transfer from San Jose State, which has a rivalry with Fresno State, playing every year for the Valley Trophy, a silver letter V. In his two seasons with the Spartans, Thomas never won the trophy, so he's pumped to try and win the rock.
A few minutes earlier, in the same media session, WSU linebacker Keith Brown treated the question the same way that Dunham did. A rivalry rock? He hadn't caught wind of the news.
Within only a few seconds, Brown was smiling, just like his teammate. The idea may have sounded a little funny, a little off-the-wall, but Brown considers himself a competitor. If there's something on the line, he wants to go take it, whatever it looks like.
"Hey," Brown said with a grin, "let's go win the rock."