The Joy of Cairns: An Unnatural History

Whence springs the human urge to balance rock on rock?

In the fall of 2001, shortly after the World Trade Center towers fell in New York, I spent a week for the first time in southeastern Utah’s canyon country. There, under what may have been the bluest sky I had ever seen, I consorted with lizards and ravens, climbed on sun-warmed sandstone, and clambered up and down unnamed gulches, maneuvering by touch as much as by sight.

I fell in love with the region, moved by the stark contrast between light and dark, awed by the clarity with which the elements appeared. Never before had water and shade been so obviously necessary. There, in arid country, I began to know and appreciate the scent of juniper and sage—and to learn about cairns, the human-made rock towers used as trail markers, among other things. The most basic meaning of this sort of cairn, I quickly grokked, is “Humans have been here.” Thus, to many: “Never fear.” No small thing. More importantly, perhaps, this sort of cairn says “Here’s the way to get to a place.” To a remote arch, to the floor or rim of a canyon, to ancient ruins. And, in reverse, these cairns say “Here’s the way back home.”

When one has ventured dozens if not hundreds of miles from human habitation, the appearance of a cairn can sometimes reassure. I love places barely touched by human culture—deep woods, snowy mountaintops, and road-free shores—but so far my urge to get lost or return to a primeval home has been tempered by the knowledge that people await my return. I recall the first time it occurred to me to stack stones to aid my own way back to civilization, as I sidled down the deep red bowl above Phillips Wash, a canyon that empties into the Escalante River. And I remember the frisson of jubilation I felt upon returning successfully, making my way in a strange and mazy place.

But cairns are used for more than route finding. Native people in polar regions have traditionally built inuksuit, stone humanoids that still mark the Arctic land in places, which once “funneled herds of caribou into depressions or rock corrals and marked lake shores at points where the fishing was good,” according to the late Barry Lopez in his book Arctic Dreams. Knud Rasmussen’s 1931 book The Netsilik Eskimos tells a different story, of men who went hunting and returned to find that all the women but one had been drowned when sea ice went adrift. The men “sorrowed so deeply over the loss of their women” writes Rasmussen, “that they built cairns up on the shore, just as many cairns as there were women lost. They did this because they wanted the souls of the drowned women to be on dry land not out in the wet sea.”

Other inuksuit were—and still are—used as landmarks for seafaring Inuit or as direction-bearing signposts for those on land. Norman Hallendy’s Inuksuit: Silent Messengers of the Arctic, besides noting such factitious stone kin worldwide as Andean apashektas and the dorazy chaloveka of Siberia, records dozens of Inuit names for specific kinds of inuksuit, including ones that express joy, signal good places to catch diverse animal species, mark meat caches, and show safe places to cross a river. He also notes the name for the remains of an old inukshuk and for human-placed stones that don’t act in the capacity of a human, as “inukshuk” literally means, but instead are meat-drying platforms, structures used to steady telescopes, objects believed to have the power to heal, markers of important events, memorials showing where killings took place, and stones in the shape of a doorway through which a shaman can enter the spirit world.

Another category is the Inuksuliaviniq inuungittumut: an inukshuk built by a non-Inuk. Cairns built in the Far North by European explorers and settlers “still stand out crisply in the landscape,” writes Lopez, “on hills and headlands, and at turns of the coastline; and they are still utilized by bush pilots and others as navigational aids.” Explorer Robert Peary and his crew, obsessed with reaching the North Pole, built massive cairns on the northeast shore of Greenland in 1900, roughly twelve feet high and as wide at the base, where mementos were buried, says Lopez, sometimes “soup tins from the ship, containing the name of the shore party, the date, a short account of the voyage, and perhaps a penny from an officer’s pocket, or a uniform button.”

In Nunavut, where the territorial flag is emblazoned with a red inukshuk, amateur historian Louie Kamookak was fascinated by the John Franklin expedition of 1845–48, having heard his great-grandmother’s story about finding relics from the expedition. In the early years of the twenty-first century, Kamookak was working on a project to “map, photograph and catalogue” all the cairns on King William Island and trying to figure out the source of each. That was “no easy task,” Up Here editor Mifi Purvis wrote at the time, “because the early searchers often didn’t or were not able to record the precise locations of some Franklin cairns.” Adding to the difficulty was that those searchers littered the island with their own stone towers. (Kamookak, who is said to have spent more than thirty years recording oral stories of Inuit encounters with Franklin’s ships and crews, died in 2018 at the age of fifty-eight.)

It seems humans can’t resist the urge to stack stones, especially in response to seeing the same. National Park Service officials in Hawaii so had it with copycat cairn builders that they started a campaign in 2005 to stop the practice. More and more visitors to Hawai’i Volcanoes National Park were said to be “gathering and stacking rocks in piles along trails, at overlooks, and on lava lakes,” a press release reported, an activity that was illegal, not to mention unseemly. The park officials cited “Federal law 36 CFR 2.1 (a) (1) (iv),” a statute that prohibited “possessing, destroying, injuring, defacing, removing, or disturbing from its natural state all mineral resources.” More importantly, it noted that “the proliferation of rock piles (sometimes numbering in the hundreds) destroys the geological story and creates an environment unnaturally manipulated by the human hand.” Copycat cairns at Halema’uma’u Crater displaced rock that had gone undisturbed since natural explosions in 1924 scattered it. Their builders also carelessly mimic ahu, stone piles in the park built long ago by Hawaiians to mark trails, land divisions, and other sites, as well as contemporary ahu erected by park workers as trail markers. Humans can learn lessons from stones. The first is to leave things alone.

Wherever rocks and people come together, it seems, cairns exist. That connection is apparent in the etymology of the word inukshuk, which comes from inuk—the Inuit word for person (specifically Inuit person). Similarly, the German word for cairn is steinmann, and in Dutch it’s steenman—literally “stone man.” The third edition of Webster’s New International Dictionary of the English Language notes that “cairn” comes from the Scottish Gaelic “carn” and defines the object as being “a rounded or pyramidal heap of stones made as a monument or memorial or as a landmark or trail marker for explorers, surveyors, or hikers.”

Indeed, Scotland is home today to countless cairns and prehistoric arrangements of stone—circles, mounds, Neolithic tombs—many much larger (and probably older) than anything comparable in North America. The cairns of Clava, circular Bronze Age burial tombs located near Inverness, range upwards of one hundred feet in diameter. Scotland-based sculptor Andy Goldsworthy’s stone works, especially his large pear- or egg-shaped cairns, seem inspired by these ancient structures.

Megalithic standing stones, henges, and table-like stone tombs sometimes known as dolmens extend across the British Isles. Their likes appear elsewhere in Europe, in Indonesia and India, in Turkey, Russia, Ethiopia, China, Korea, and Japan. Who created them, and why?

Cairns often mystify. The Scottish cairns have long been studied, and the presence of human remains under them verify a purpose. But who built those conical heaps of stone found near Red Wing, Minnesota, in the mid-nineteenth century, and what use did they serve, if any? Were they also burial markers? Members of the New England Antiquities Research Association have photographed large lichen-covered cairns in Vermont and documented other examples found in Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Discovers of these and related stone structures—apparently tables, benches, and altars—make conjectures about them individually. Do they date from recent decades, and, if so, are they Neo-pagan in origin, or were they created for fun or to deceive? Or are they centuries-old, created by Indigenous people??????

What about the so-called medicine wheels of the western United States and Canada, large circular arrangements of rocks and cairns, such as the Medicine Wheel National Historic Landmark, a circle set on a plateau in Bighorn County, Wyoming? Was it built for astronomical reasons? Religious ones? Relative experts do not agree.

On a ridge above the Cross River in northern Minnesota I once came upon two broad stone cairns, not tall but wide, one about fifteen feet across, located on both sides of a trail in a clearing. They’re still a mystery to me.

What is it about the human urge to balance stones? Perhaps there’s something about having seen balanced rocks in nature, one huge boulder balanced precariously on another. The likes of these can famously be seen today in the oft-photographed Balanced Rock at Arches National Park, as well as in Big Bend National Park, Chiricahua National Monument, Devil’s Lake State Park in Wisconsin, at the base of Pike’s Peak, and elsewhere.

Maybe the compulsion to stack comes from a subconscious desire to touch the sky. Countless cairns on mountain peaks testify to this, from New Hampshire’s lowly Mount Bond to the likes of Grinnell Point in Glacier National Park. The practice is not universal. Inhabitants of the Himalayas build cairns at lower levels in mountain passes. Tenzin Gyatso, the fourteenth Dalai Lama, writes, “When climbing a mountain is the only way to complete a journey, Tibetan travelers respectfully add a stone to the cairns at the top of the pass with a shout of ‘Lha-gyla-lo—Victory to the gods.’”

Westerners are evidently less concerned about offending the gods. At the green top of Bear Mountain, the highest peak in Connecticut, I’ve seen a ten-foot cairn, the stabilized ruins of a tower over twice that size built in the 1880s by a mason named Owen Travis. I’ve balanced snowballs on the cairn topping Mount Katahdin, the high point in Maine, marking a spot that Henry David Thoreau sought unsuccessfully. In 1846, disdaining trails, Thoreau climbed only as far as the tableland below the summit, an unusual place that moved him to write, “Contact! Contact! Who are we? Where are we?” Both questions are sometimes answered by a cairn. At the site where Thoreau erected his cabin on Walden Pond, a memorial rock pile was begun in 1872 that exists today, though in a slightly different location. Elsewhere cairns memorialize the likes of Australian and British prisoners of war in Malaysia, flash flood victims in the Alps, eighteenth-century British poet John Lapraik, and the completion of the Great Southern Railway. A cairn in the Rongbuk Valley at the foot of Mount Everest commemorates Joe Tasker and Pete Boardman, mountaineers who disappeared from the Northeast Ridge of Everest while making a summit attempt in 1982. “Who are we?” and “Where are we?” indeed.

While massive cairns cap the peaks of Ben Lui in the Scottish Highlands and Swirl How in Cumbria, England, far humbler ones, distant kin, mark trails on bare rock in the Colorado Plateau. “Follow the cairns,” say guidebooks, as if there’s always only one way. Some hikers claim to make sport of toppling cairns wherever they go, contemptuous, but others are paid to create them. The job posting for trail crew leader at Baxter State Park in Maine, where the Appalachian Trail has its terminus at Katahdin, at least for a time listed “experience in building rock structures” as a requirement. One of the job’s duties: marking trails with paint blazes, rock cairns, and signs.

If it’s a job for some to build cairns, for others it’s artistic expression and perhaps compulsive avocation. One May evening on the shore of Lake Superior in northern Michigan, I walked on a beach, intending to watch the sunset. Instead I went to work (or to play), building seven cairns of two stones each, white on red, in shallow water, then watched the seven sentinels washed by waves, as a ring-billed gull observed from a boulder beyond my reach. Half an hour later, four of the small stones were gone from where I’d placed them. Three adhered, despite the waves. In the morning: water.

There is pleasure inherent in creating such temporary works, negotiating the tension between an urge to see a structure last and willingness to embrace its demise. Using natural materials at hand, experiencing ephemeral beauty and balance, the building of cairns may be related to the ancient human urge to make handprints: to have a hand in things.

Toronto-based photographer Peter Riedel can attest to the attraction of returning again and again to things that fail. As a neophyte at balancing stones in the summer of 2005, he started this practice on the shores of Lake Ontario in response to some deep urge, and he found it the most meditative thing he had ever done. “I could zone out, relax and tune totally into what I was doing,” he said. Something about the place, where rock meets sky and water at once, seemed right. He also enjoyed talking with people who stopped to watch him, and he found himself enamored with the entire process. “Why it became such a need and fascination is still a bit of a mystery to me,” Riedel declared, noting that there were days when he had to do it, when it was an obsession. “I think it may signify for me how little is really in our control even though we think we control much of our lives,” he said. “There is balance in everything. And I had lost mine and was somehow either trying to gain it back or demonstrate to myself how precarious it all really is.”

Some of Riedel’s cairns have been intricate, alternating balanced slabs and spheres of rock, teeter-totter fashion. Others have been simple, balancing just a few stones and pieces of ice. All have fallen, of course. That’s the thing about this sort of cairn. They define and even celebrate a moment. Though sometimes documented in photos, they’re here today and gone tomorrow. Sometime they are gone today.

Maybe it is also therapeutic to see enacted what one has imagined (or assumed) to be impossible. On the beaches of Sausalito, California, using large stones he finds there, Bill Dan creates ephemeral, gravity-defying rock sculptures that are not beautiful as much as they are unbelievable. View photos of these wonders and your reaction will belie your inherent tendency toward skepticism or credulity.

To heft stone, to build a cairn at sunset, and to feel connection to the earth is sane and costs nothing. But a Canadian financial analyst some years ago launched Rukshuk: The Game of Rock Balancing, bringing cairn building indoors, downsizing it, and turning it into a timed competition. For those unhappily engulfed in a mediated culture, where alienation is rampant and so much is out of balance, the appeal is clearly evident. But introducing a timer to rock balancing is flat-out wrong. Our choicest days on earth are those when we move intuitively, lost in a deep focus, extraordinarily balanced, and unaware of time. Cairn building days, perhaps.

There are no dead ends. Mountains constantly change. And all cairns mark time. According to Hallendy, a type of inuksuk exists that has no function whatsoever. An inuksuk “built to shorten the time while waiting” (an inutsuiutuinnaqtuq). Picture the builders of these, frozen in time, grinning. Waiting.