I learned in the last year on my PCT hike, I am not 25 years old. Those heavy sledgehammers don't swing as with no trouble as they used to. I try a 12-pound sledge but that just bounce off the rocks like a toy. Part of the difficulty is that they were all lava rock, the majority of which were quite porous, like petrified sponges. We also did not have an air compressor and a pneumatic drill. The after that to the last nail in my coffin was the fact that we were operational at an elevation of 13,630 feet! Needless to say, I exhausted more time carrying the out of order rocks over to the road rather than contravention them.

I was able to obtain in four or five good swings before I was out of breath for breath and had to take a break. I also erudite that all rocks are not shaped equal. Some of them were much less porous and were a lot easier to break. Also the thinner flat ones were fairly easy to break. The hardest ones were the great thick ones, that were usually the nearly everyone porous as well. I left those for the juvenile ones.