A little weekend magic ...
Just a quick post to share a little bit of hiking magic I just read about: apparently, in San Francisco, there’s a “hidden” quarry where people go to stack rocks and leave adorable little notes and painted stones. Like a fairy garden, but definitely a human creation.
Image by Robert Schrader from Pexels.
Though the author of the San Francisco article doesn’t say so, these rock piles are cairns, and they have a long history in many cultures. The Inuit and other arctic peoples use an iconic cairn that looks like a human, standing on the horizon. The Irish used cairns for tombs:
Queen Meave is known in Irish legends for Táin Bó Cúailnge (Cattle Raid of Cooley) when she invaded Ulster to steal a stud bull by the name of Donn Cuailnge. Folklore says that she is buried in the Cairn with her full body Armour on and in a standing position facing her enemies in Ulster. If you stand at the Cairn facing north you can actually see Ulster far in the distance.
Today, the National Park Service uses cairns to mark the way in some of the parks they manage. One thing I like is that they apparently use different types of cairns for different parks, as appropriate to the history and natural resources of the region. So, for instance, for Arcadia National Park in Maine, they’ve discovered that there was a whole history of building a particular kind of cairn, and they’re trying to bring that back:
In 1896 Waldron Bates, lead author of the hiking map still referenced to create today’s trail maps of Acadia, developed a standard for building cairns in a unique style we now call the Bates cairn. However, starting in the 1950s or 60s the Bates cairns were replaced by the traditional conical cairns. Then, in the 1990s, Acadia National Park began recovering this little piece of history by re-establishing and building Bates cairns on the many east-side trails in the park.
Image by Manfred Antranias Zimmer from Pixabay.
Have you ever come across a cairn while on a hike? Maybe even a whole area of them? What is it about them that feels special?
Feel free to leave a comment below, and have a great Saturday, y’all!
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