Rather than tie a rock or a stick to your rope, clip your rope to a stuff sack, put a baseball to softball sized rock in the stuff sack, and hurl the rock over the tree limb in question.
To a proficient PCT hang user: how do you get the bag more than 8 feet up in the air? I got confused by this when I tried to put the article into practice, and it's the big reason I went back to tying my bags off to adjacent trees.
I keep the rope and biner in a homemade stuff sack that I do just that with.
A good bear hang (for pesky bag-getting bears that have yet to reach the heights of Yosemite bears, which get them no matter how you hang them) is 20 feet off the ground, 10 feet down, on a limb that won't support a 40-50 lb cub.
You can get the PCT hang that high if you get a limb that's high enough in the first place. You hoist the bag all the way up to the limb, get the stick butterflied into the line as high as you possibly can, and let it down until the stick catches in the biner. Roll up the rope high as you can and secure it with a half hitch so it doesn't dangle low.
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