Cairns: Silent Messengers on the Trail

David B. Williams To be published by The Mountaineers Books Fall 2012

Once upon a time, or so the Brothers Grimm told us, Hansel and Gretel lived near a large forest with their father and stepmother. This being a fairy tale, she was evil and during a great famine convinced the father to abandon his miserable little cherubs in the woods. Upon overhearing the plan, Hansel foiled it by collecting white pebbles and dropping them on their route. He and Gretel then followed the stones back to safety.

But evil is persistent, so during the next famine the stepmother tried the same trick again. This time, however, she locked the door at night to prevent any enterprising youth from collecting white pebbles. The next day, the ever resourceful Hansel ripped a small hunk of bread into pieces to use as trail markers.

Unfortunately for Hansel and Gretel, the birds of the forest got to the bread before they did and ate all of Hansel’s crumbs. Without the trail markers, the kids got lost, made the mistake of nibbling an edible house, and ended up in the clutches of another fairy tale trope, an old witch, who thought they would make a good meal. As we all know, Hansel and Gretel escaped, finally made it back home, where their stepmother had died, and lived happily ever after.

I retell this story for one reason: to focus on Hansel and Gretel’s backcountry skills. Clearly they chose the wrong medium for marking the trail. I am not blaming them for their poor decision. Hansel made the best of a bad situation when he scattered bread crumbs but perhaps he could have made a better choice.

Let me turn to odd source to examine this thought. I don’t think that child psychologist Bruno Bettelheim was known for his hiking prowess but in his groundbreaking The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales, he makes a wise observation. He writes that on Hansel’s second trip into the forest “he did not use his intelligence as well [as on the first trip]—he, who lived close to a big forest, should have known that birds would eat the bread crumbs. Hansel might instead have studied landmarks on the way in, to find his way back out.” Oh, how much happier they would have been if only Hansel and Gretel had paid better attention on the trail or could have had a better way to mark the trail.

As most hikers know, one of the best, and simplest ways to mark the trail is to pile up rocks into a cairn. Neither size nor shape really matter. An effective marker might simply be two narrow rocks stacked vertically next to each other, a small pile located on one side of a trail fork, a massive pile high on a ridge and visible for miles, or a big rock with a little one on it pointing toward the correct route. This latter style might be the origin of the term ducks, an equivalent of cairn often used in the Sierra Nevada mountains.

People have long made cairns for more than just marking a trail. Lost explorers have built cairns, hoping that the rocks would protect precious journals or notes. In many native cultures, tired travelers spit on a small stone and added it to a trailside cairn as a way to transfer and elimate fatigue. Inuit people across the Arctic erected cairns called inuksuit that helped drive caribou to a communal kill site. Cairns mark territorial boundaries, favored routes, good hunting grounds, places of danger, burial spots of dead relatives, territories of historic significance, sites to appease a deity, and locations to seek good luck.

At the most basic level, building or visiting a cairn is about making a connection. A connection to place, to the past, to a spiritual being, to an ancestor. That connection may be as primal as finding a cairn and knowing that you are not lost or at least are on the right path. Or it may be deeper, where you arrive at a cairn and place a pebble as a token, not knowing exactly why but also knowing that one’s father and grandfather did the same thing, so you do, too.

In this sense cairns become a form of communication. In a time when we didn’t all carry cell phones or GPS units, cairns provided an enduring message from one person to another. The message didn’t require any special knowledge or tools. It could be communicated no matter the weather or season. When you saw the cairn, you knew what it meant. Now, as more people travel to new places, cairns still communicate in a timeless language. They may not express as multi-faceted meanings as they would to someone from that place but still they tell the new traveler, you are here, you are not alone. It is a message that can convey a profound meaning to a weary traveler.

From high in the Arctic south down into Argentina, from the Himalayas to the shores of the seven seas, from the deserts of Arabia to the forests of the Amazon, cairns occur around the world. They appear in the Bible, in Homer, in Kipling, and of course in the works of Scottish poet, Robert Burn: “Ye hills, near neebors o’the starns, That proudly cock your cresting cairns!” They have been built for centuries upon centuries, and I suspect, will continue to be built long into the future.

As symbol, sign, and shrine, cairns have attracted the attention of archaeologists, geologists, and ecologists. They have mapped them, analyzed them, dug them up, and rebuilt them with the hopes of teasing out the secrets of the stones. Many mysteries still remain but many questions have been answered, too.

Ultimately, cairns have been an essential guide aiding travelers for thousands of years. As Hansel and Gretel learned, paying attention on your journey can be critical but we don’t always do so. In such a situation, nothing is more reassuring than coming across a cairn, silent messengers of so much meaning.