Ron Pitelka has an idea for what to name the 50-ton prehistoric boulder that was unearthed this summer at O’Hare Airport. “I would probably call it ‘Geo,’” Pitelka said. “It might not be funny, but it’s a little more appropriate.”
Why should his opinion carry any weight? Because Pitelka’s the guy who found the giant rock back in June, as part of a construction crew working on the airport’s latest expansion project.
In all of the 23 years he’s been operating excavators — so, half his life — “I’ve never seen a boulder this big come out of the ground. It’s pretty damned rare,” Pitelka, who lives in Homer Glen, told WTTW News. “I was like a kid on Christmas.” The pictures he’s seen circulating online don’t remotely do the boulder justice, he said.
Some backstory: On June 16, he was behind the controls of a Caterpillar 352, a beast of a machine that’s about as large as excavators come outside of those used for mining. Its bucket is six-and-a-half feet wide — four scoops can overload a semi — and it’s capable of lifting 50,000 pounds. His team had been digging in O’Hare’s South Basin, a 110-acre stormwater retention pond undergoing expansion, with the dirt then being trucked over to backfill the airport’s Central Basin. Bulldozers were making thin cuts into the soil — previously undisturbed “virgin” blue clay — and then pushing it into piles for operators like Pitelka to transfer into semis. “At the bottom of one of the dirt piles I hit extremely hard ground,” he said.
Pitelka’s colleague, Matt Tracy, attempted to budge the object with his bulldozer. It didn’t move. Pitelka tried to hook it and the Cat 352 balked. Eventually, with the combined force of the bulldozer pushing and the excavator pulling, they got the boulder out of the ground. Knowing that the massive find at O’Hare could easily be 300 to 400 million years old, Pitelka asked the construction superintendent to fight for the behemoth’s preservation. When the airport announced a naming contest for the rock, Pitelka learned the boulder had been saved and was destined for greater things. “I was so excited to hear that the right people got involved,” he said. “I’m absolutely ecstatic it’s going to be on display. For me, as an (excavator) who loves boulders, it’s the coolest thing that people understand its historical significance and appreciate it.”
