From outside magazine, this is the outside podcast.

If you were to rank me among the world's great rock skippers, is it top 10, top 100,

thousand? Top billion. Top billion. Are we sure there's a billion rock skippers in the world?

Yeah, because every little kid knows how to rock skippers. Well, it doesn't know, but they just

go rocks in the water and you're about as good as that and trying to skate.

I hope you enjoy your long walk home. Yeah, so that was my middle sun's take on my rock skipping

abilities after we spent about 20 minutes throwing stones across a lake near our house.

The hard part for me here is not that my boy is clearly past the stage of seeing his dad as a

superhero. It's that his assessment brings home a hard truth. I'm not as good as skipping stones

as I like to think I am not even close, but I bet the same is true about almost anyone who had

an outdoorsy childhood. I swear, there's something about skipping stones that leads to a kind

of bravado. As a kid, you believe that with the next rock, you could break a record. And then,

as an adult, well, you still do. But the thing is, there are actual real life rock skipping

stars. For outside magazines, September October issue, British journalist Sean Williams

traveled thousands of miles to Pennsylvania to profile the best of the best, a man named Kurt Steiner,

who has dedicated his life to produce throws that defy the laws of physics. Today, for the first

episode in a new run of weekend reads of exceptional outside features, we present Sean's piece,

The School of Rocks, narrated by Simon Ves. On a clear skyd morning in March,

Kurt, mountain man Steiner, stood at a lonely bend of cinema honing creek, deep inside Pennsylvania's

elk state forest. He was dressed in a black hoodie and dollar general jeans that hid his athletic

56-year-old frame, and wore a brown beanie that pressed his long gray hair and rescued an

ask beard into a single wild mane. Steiner stared across the creek and raised his right arm into an

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