Man Tries to Dig Up Rock in His Front Yard, Finds 10,000-Lb. Boulder (Exclusive)

Brendan Dudas was having trouble mowing his lawn thanks to a large rock that was jutting out from the dirt on the side of his house in Indianapolis. Worried that mowing over the stone would break the blades, he decided to start digging.

As a teacher on summer break, Dudas tells PEOPLE he had a lot of time on his hands, but he never could have guessed what he would unearth.

“I’ve just been staring at this boulder that was sticking out of my side yard, and being bored on summer break, I finally said I’m gonna start digging this thing,” Dudas, 31, says. “I was motivated.”

“There’s a guy on TikTok called @TheLawnTools and he’s been finding boulders in his yard, so I saw a video of him digging it out and it looked so easy. It wasn’t that big,” he adds. “He brought in this tractor and lifted it out. I thought I could do that.” 

As Dudas started digging, he loaded all the dirt and sod into buckets, but “it went off the rails really quickly” when he realized how big the “rock” actually was. He started digging around the stone until he could find the edges to gauge how he would be able to pull it out. However, it felt like he had to keep digging and digging to reach the end of the rock.

While this was happening, Dudas began posting about the dig on his TikTok account, listening to the people in the comments section who offered suggestions, such as getting a crane to lift the boulder out.

“We could’ve immediately brought in a big piece of machinery and tried to rip it out, but if it extended to my neighbor’s house and messed with their foundation, or the same with mine, then we would’ve been in trouble,” Dudas shares.

“It was authentically a ton of trial and error,” he adds. “I started digging and seeing what would happen and listening to comments and seeing what my solutions were. Then the crane company came along and posed a solution and we went with it.” 

Once the crane pulled out the boulder, they determined that the slab of rock weighed over 10,300 lbs. Although he doesn’t have an exact age, Dudas estimates that the boulder is around 10,000 to 15,000 years old, from around the time the last major Ice Age ended.

Once the boulder was removed from the ground, it was placed on his front lawn for all to see. Dudas ended up using the boulder in his landscaping, making space for the massive rock in his front yard, adding mulch, topsoil, and indigenous plants to the area, as well as other smaller rocks.

After finishing up his front yard, he moved on to work on the side of his house. His next plan is to add lights to the setup so that everyone in the neighborhood can see the boulder at night. 

“Digging out this boulder started this chain reaction that ultimately led to me completely redoing my house,” Dudas shares. “The overall message has been making the yard the envy of the neighborhood and doing it one little chain reaction project at a time.”

Dudas shares that his landscaping project has also inspired some of his neighbors to clean up their outdoor spaces.

“I’ll be out there and the neighbor across the street will be out mowing his grass and he’s edging his sidewalk and digging up some plants and I had never seen him out there before,” Dudas shares. “One of the things that I want to continue with is spreading the energy down the neighborhood and watching it all get nicer and feed off of each other a little bit.” 

While Dudas has no plans to unearth any other boulders, he is enjoying the journey of taking care of the one he has.