I used to knock cairns down.
Not just knock them down but pull them apart and fling their constituent rocks in every direction—obliterating their existence.
It was part of my job as a backcountry ranger for the National Park Service in Alaska. I still think it was the right thing to do. The parks I worked for were trailless and composed largely of designated wilderness. The purpose was to discourage the inevitable erosion and proliferation of trails into and across the landscape, and thus the subsequent erosion of a unique outdoor experience that necessitated self-reliance and route finding.
We only did this with new—typically dainty—cairns built by hikers; not the far older, larger, and more intricate cairns left by native peoples or occasionally Euro-American pioneers of another era.
The truth though is that I love cairns—they are a unique combination of the natural and cultural—the found and constructed—utterly simple yet various, and sometimes meaningful, in ways that far exceed mere route markers.
This photo-essay includes images of remarkable cairns I have encountered in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and Nepal. An exploration of cairns opens unique cultural worlds and varying ethical comportments towards place—couched not as philosophical debate but as gentle presentation—forming part of the ongoing discussion of the intersection of nature and culture, while adding a comparative aspect of place.
The meanings cairns have for people of each of these regions may differ from my own wilderness ethic, yet overlap in surprising ways with my own sense of place—ranging from Tibetan Buddhist markers indicating sacred sites to the obscene rituals of Icelanders in the Highlands to the concurrently spiritual and pragmatic senses of tukiliit in Greenland.
Cairns, as you will see, are much more than stacked rocks.
Not just knock them down but pull them apart and fling their constituent rocks in every direction—obliterating their existence.
It was part of my job as a backcountry ranger for the National Park Service in Alaska. I still think it was the right thing to do. The parks I worked for were trailless and composed largely of designated wilderness. The purpose was to discourage the inevitable erosion and proliferation of trails into and across the landscape, and thus the subsequent erosion of a unique outdoor experience that necessitated self-reliance and route finding.
We only did this with new—typically dainty—cairns built by hikers; not the far older, larger, and more intricate cairns left by native peoples or occasionally Euro-American pioneers of another era.
The truth though is that I love cairns—they are a unique combination of the natural and cultural—the found and constructed—utterly simple yet various, and sometimes meaningful, in ways that far exceed mere route markers.
This photo-essay includes images of remarkable cairns I have encountered in Alaska, Greenland, Iceland, and Nepal. An exploration of cairns opens unique cultural worlds and varying ethical comportments towards place—couched not as philosophical debate but as gentle presentation—forming part of the ongoing discussion of the intersection of nature and culture, while adding a comparative aspect of place.
The meanings cairns have for people of each of these regions may differ from my own wilderness ethic, yet overlap in surprising ways with my own sense of place—ranging from Tibetan Buddhist markers indicating sacred sites to the obscene rituals of Icelanders in the Highlands to the concurrently spiritual and pragmatic senses of tukiliit in Greenland.
Cairns, as you will see, are much more than stacked rocks.
Alaska
On more than one occasion, while backpacking in more remote corners of Denali and Gates of the Arctic National Parks, I discovered relatively ancient cairns, unknown even to the park’s resident archaeologist. These were always at a point with wide expanses of the landscape below, usually on prominent ridgelines, where a small group might be able to scout for herds of caribou below.
Often, I would encounter these while out for days either by myself or with one other person, and this would be one of the only signs of humanity we would see besides planes flying overhead. These cairns would sometimes accompany hunting blinds tucked into hillsides where traditional hunters would wait for caribou to approach closely enough to attack them at close range. Or rock rings used to weigh down caribou-skin tents. Or flecks of stone or small artifacts.
Each of these were reminders of a very different time that resonated with my own. I too was on foot, picking my way across a sometimes difficult-to-traverse landscape, relying on my own judgement and experience of the best routes given my present goals. It is thus no coincidence that I would stumble across cairns on my journey—those before me similarly sought the least exhausting ways to move from place to place and had found the same consistent features that eased travel. The land spatially unified our temporal rift.
On more than one occasion, while backpacking in more remote corners of Denali and Gates of the Arctic National Parks, I discovered relatively ancient cairns, unknown even to the park’s resident archaeologist. These were always at a point with wide expanses of the landscape below, usually on prominent ridgelines, where a small group might be able to scout for herds of caribou below.
Often, I would encounter these while out for days either by myself or with one other person, and this would be one of the only signs of humanity we would see besides planes flying overhead. These cairns would sometimes accompany hunting blinds tucked into hillsides where traditional hunters would wait for caribou to approach closely enough to attack them at close range. Or rock rings used to weigh down caribou-skin tents. Or flecks of stone or small artifacts.
Each of these were reminders of a very different time that resonated with my own. I too was on foot, picking my way across a sometimes difficult-to-traverse landscape, relying on my own judgement and experience of the best routes given my present goals. It is thus no coincidence that I would stumble across cairns on my journey—those before me similarly sought the least exhausting ways to move from place to place and had found the same consistent features that eased travel. The land spatially unified our temporal rift.
Iceland
I encountered several impressive cairns on a journey to the Highlands of Iceland in the region above Bárðardalur. These were intricate stacks of rough black and brown volcanic rock coated in bright orange lichens. They sometimes included legs and had an anthropomorphic feel. These cairns simultaneously stood apart from the surrounding volcanic plains where layers of violent new land creation were piled atop and across each other, while they encapsulated these very places.
Some volcanic formations in the area have spires and arms that reach out like tortured gargoyles, extending up into the air like cairns, thus at times challenging one’s discernment of natural versus constructed.
Icelandic manuscript specialist Viðar Hreinsson told me that in addition to being route markers, Icelandic cairns traditionally had slightly perverse local meanings: “There is a story in the Book of Settlement about a guy who was exploring the country and found the Kjölur-route across the highlands, between Langjökull and Hofsjökull glaciers. There was a tradition of beinakerlingarvísa. The cairns were called “beinakerling”—“a hag/lady of bones”, and traveling men would make verses, often a bit obscene, to them, put them into a hollow leg of a sheep or a cow, and then stick them into the cairn. These were often about the lady’s desire to sleep with someone, even the bishops. The oldest known verses of this kind are from the 17th century.”
I encountered several impressive cairns on a journey to the Highlands of Iceland in the region above Bárðardalur. These were intricate stacks of rough black and brown volcanic rock coated in bright orange lichens. They sometimes included legs and had an anthropomorphic feel. These cairns simultaneously stood apart from the surrounding volcanic plains where layers of violent new land creation were piled atop and across each other, while they encapsulated these very places.
Some volcanic formations in the area have spires and arms that reach out like tortured gargoyles, extending up into the air like cairns, thus at times challenging one’s discernment of natural versus constructed.
Icelandic manuscript specialist Viðar Hreinsson told me that in addition to being route markers, Icelandic cairns traditionally had slightly perverse local meanings: “There is a story in the Book of Settlement about a guy who was exploring the country and found the Kjölur-route across the highlands, between Langjökull and Hofsjökull glaciers. There was a tradition of beinakerlingarvísa. The cairns were called “beinakerling”—“a hag/lady of bones”, and traveling men would make verses, often a bit obscene, to them, put them into a hollow leg of a sheep or a cow, and then stick them into the cairn. These were often about the lady’s desire to sleep with someone, even the bishops. The oldest known verses of this kind are from the 17th century.”
Nepal
Cairns are ubiquitous in the Nepalese Himalaya along traveled routes, often in combination with colorful prayer flags. After some weeks trekking there, I started to notice a pattern: cairns would crop up on mountain ridges, passes, at high points, and near water sources, all in places that were notably scenic and would have stood out to a visiting tourist or have become points of interest in other regions of the world. They are in places considered locally sacred in ways that might seem foreign to many outsiders, as they are thought to be inhabited by spirits. At a more basic level however, without these specific religious overtones, I believe the sense of these places as sacred is in some ways widely shared—they stand out as land or water features with unique beauty that give us pause and remind us of our place in the universe.
At some points, cairns have grown and multiplied to extra-ordinary levels. On rare occasions, hundreds—or perhaps even thousands—of cairns are concentrated. Are these unusually sacred places or is this just coincidence? My guide and I stopped at one such concentration at a view where a glacier dropped into an icy blue lake. As we dawdled, he began to create his own stack. When I asked him why, he only replied that “I like to.”
Here is an assortment of experiences and educated explanations of Nepalese (and Tibetan, as the basic cultural foundation is the same) cairns.
“Trail markers are common on the Himalayan walking routes, indicating a ritual place or signifying a way into the mountains, across a high pass, or through drifts of deep snow. Some travelers passing a cairn will add a stone to it here and there or build another nearby, so that over time a landscape of cairns may emerge in a single place. The small rock towers always prompted me to pause, to reflect upon what it means to journey through a difficult place, and to take comfort in the passage of others before me.”
“most sacred sites require some kind of demarcation on the ground to be recognizable—for example, the symbolic architecture of a religious structure, a wall of stacked scriptural rock tablets along a path, a stupa in a forest grove or a cairn placed atop a mountain pass, or a carved statue or painted mandala set inside a temple.”
(David Zurick in Land of Pure Vision: The Sacred Geography of Tibet and the Himalaya)
“Local spirits are associated with locations in the natural environment such as specific mountains, mountain passes, rivers, lakes, springs, caves, trees, and so on. When such a location has a known association with local gods or spirits it will be ritually marked in some way, such as setting up
prayer flags on the location, or cairns (lha tho) on mountain tops in honour of the mountain deities.”
“Every time I arrived there, the Tibetans I was travelling with would throw a stone onto the cairn or fasten a new prayer flag to it. At the same time, they would shout out 'ki ki so so lha rgyal lho' 'the gods are victorious'. Already some four hours before arriving at the Tibetan settlement one encounters the first visible signs of ritual activity carried out to maintain harmony with the local spirits.”
(Colin Millard in sMan and Glud: Standard Tibetan Medicine and Ritual Medicine in a Bone Medical School and Clinic in Nepal [The Tibet Journal])
And one traveler notes that upon reaching a pass after a long, arduous climb, “you gulp some water, add a stone to the cairn to thank the local spirits for your safety—and walk down for a change, until the next pass” (Nathalie Trouveroy in Mustang: A Walk Across Five Centuries [India International Centre Quarterly])
On occasion, I would encounter cairns built atop glacial ice.
Cairns are ubiquitous in the Nepalese Himalaya along traveled routes, often in combination with colorful prayer flags. After some weeks trekking there, I started to notice a pattern: cairns would crop up on mountain ridges, passes, at high points, and near water sources, all in places that were notably scenic and would have stood out to a visiting tourist or have become points of interest in other regions of the world. They are in places considered locally sacred in ways that might seem foreign to many outsiders, as they are thought to be inhabited by spirits. At a more basic level however, without these specific religious overtones, I believe the sense of these places as sacred is in some ways widely shared—they stand out as land or water features with unique beauty that give us pause and remind us of our place in the universe.
At some points, cairns have grown and multiplied to extra-ordinary levels. On rare occasions, hundreds—or perhaps even thousands—of cairns are concentrated. Are these unusually sacred places or is this just coincidence? My guide and I stopped at one such concentration at a view where a glacier dropped into an icy blue lake. As we dawdled, he began to create his own stack. When I asked him why, he only replied that “I like to.”
Here is an assortment of experiences and educated explanations of Nepalese (and Tibetan, as the basic cultural foundation is the same) cairns.
“Trail markers are common on the Himalayan walking routes, indicating a ritual place or signifying a way into the mountains, across a high pass, or through drifts of deep snow. Some travelers passing a cairn will add a stone to it here and there or build another nearby, so that over time a landscape of cairns may emerge in a single place. The small rock towers always prompted me to pause, to reflect upon what it means to journey through a difficult place, and to take comfort in the passage of others before me.”
“most sacred sites require some kind of demarcation on the ground to be recognizable—for example, the symbolic architecture of a religious structure, a wall of stacked scriptural rock tablets along a path, a stupa in a forest grove or a cairn placed atop a mountain pass, or a carved statue or painted mandala set inside a temple.”
(David Zurick in Land of Pure Vision: The Sacred Geography of Tibet and the Himalaya)
“Local spirits are associated with locations in the natural environment such as specific mountains, mountain passes, rivers, lakes, springs, caves, trees, and so on. When such a location has a known association with local gods or spirits it will be ritually marked in some way, such as setting up
prayer flags on the location, or cairns (lha tho) on mountain tops in honour of the mountain deities.”
“Every time I arrived there, the Tibetans I was travelling with would throw a stone onto the cairn or fasten a new prayer flag to it. At the same time, they would shout out 'ki ki so so lha rgyal lho' 'the gods are victorious'. Already some four hours before arriving at the Tibetan settlement one encounters the first visible signs of ritual activity carried out to maintain harmony with the local spirits.”
(Colin Millard in sMan and Glud: Standard Tibetan Medicine and Ritual Medicine in a Bone Medical School and Clinic in Nepal [The Tibet Journal])
And one traveler notes that upon reaching a pass after a long, arduous climb, “you gulp some water, add a stone to the cairn to thank the local spirits for your safety—and walk down for a change, until the next pass” (Nathalie Trouveroy in Mustang: A Walk Across Five Centuries [India International Centre Quarterly])
On occasion, I would encounter cairns built atop glacial ice.
Greenland
A massive mound of stones solely sits above a cliffy fjord of slate gray waters pocked by remnants of floating ice hurled from the face of adjacent glaciers. It dryly speaks of companionship and memory in its silent stony language, defying the brutality of battering from frigid gales and ceaseless snows, proclaiming prior presence and purpose, enabling the living to fulfill warm wants.
Perhaps the world’s most famous cairn form is the human-shaped Inuksuk (so-called), deeply associated with Canada, even serving as a symbol of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, and gracing the Nunavut flag. Inuksuk and other stacked stones of various sorts have been created and used by the Inuit across the Arctic (including Greenland) for millennia.
One of the foremost scholars on Arctic cairns is Canadian Norman Hallendy, who wrote the book Tukiliit: The Stone People Who Live in the Wind, which includes many photos of these structures from across the Arctic and even a few international representatives. Needless to say, Inuit cairns are far more diverse than I imagined.
A review of Hallendy’s book offers this summary of the complex situation:
“Made of loose stone, tukiliit can be found in countless sizes, shapes and forms. However, Hallendy suggests that even a casual observer will recognize five general shapes among the countless possibilities. The first group contains the innunguait, with distinctive human-like forms; the second group is made up of the tikkuutit, or pointers. The third group consists of inuksummarik or inuksukjuaq, huge structures that can be seen at a distance. Another group of special stone objects are named sakkabluniit. They often look like inuksuit, but they are not; rather, they are related to some spiritual entity or place. Thus, for example, the angaku’habvik or angakkururvik is both an object and a place. Shamans were initiated where these stone structures stood, making these sites among the most respected places on the metaphysical landscape. A tunillarvik, or a tunirrsirvik, is a single stone believed to provide healing and protection to those who venerate it and leave it gifts. A tupqujaq takes the form of a doorway, through which the shaman passes into the spirit world.” (Astrid Ogilvie in Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research)
Inuksuk, it turns out, are just one of many examples of tukiliit, while the distinctive anthropomorphic form most of us think of as inuksuk are really inunnguaq. Yes, it may just be hopeless.
Tukiliit serve a huge variety of practical and spiritual purposes from navigation to marking snow depth, cache locations, good gathering and hunting spots, or good river crossings, to aiding in caribou hunting as human-like decoys, to forming a literal window onto notable places, to marking places of spiritual significance and ceremony, to serving as a memorial to tragic or memorable events.
It is interesting to think of cairns as a primary form of traditional Arctic architecture, which, though not formed into buildings for human habitation or daily use, makes the landscape livable.
You can read a lot more about Inuit cairns in Hallendy’s book or here.
A massive mound of stones solely sits above a cliffy fjord of slate gray waters pocked by remnants of floating ice hurled from the face of adjacent glaciers. It dryly speaks of companionship and memory in its silent stony language, defying the brutality of battering from frigid gales and ceaseless snows, proclaiming prior presence and purpose, enabling the living to fulfill warm wants.
Perhaps the world’s most famous cairn form is the human-shaped Inuksuk (so-called), deeply associated with Canada, even serving as a symbol of the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, and gracing the Nunavut flag. Inuksuk and other stacked stones of various sorts have been created and used by the Inuit across the Arctic (including Greenland) for millennia.
One of the foremost scholars on Arctic cairns is Canadian Norman Hallendy, who wrote the book Tukiliit: The Stone People Who Live in the Wind, which includes many photos of these structures from across the Arctic and even a few international representatives. Needless to say, Inuit cairns are far more diverse than I imagined.
A review of Hallendy’s book offers this summary of the complex situation:
“Made of loose stone, tukiliit can be found in countless sizes, shapes and forms. However, Hallendy suggests that even a casual observer will recognize five general shapes among the countless possibilities. The first group contains the innunguait, with distinctive human-like forms; the second group is made up of the tikkuutit, or pointers. The third group consists of inuksummarik or inuksukjuaq, huge structures that can be seen at a distance. Another group of special stone objects are named sakkabluniit. They often look like inuksuit, but they are not; rather, they are related to some spiritual entity or place. Thus, for example, the angaku’habvik or angakkururvik is both an object and a place. Shamans were initiated where these stone structures stood, making these sites among the most respected places on the metaphysical landscape. A tunillarvik, or a tunirrsirvik, is a single stone believed to provide healing and protection to those who venerate it and leave it gifts. A tupqujaq takes the form of a doorway, through which the shaman passes into the spirit world.” (Astrid Ogilvie in Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research)
Inuksuk, it turns out, are just one of many examples of tukiliit, while the distinctive anthropomorphic form most of us think of as inuksuk are really inunnguaq. Yes, it may just be hopeless.
Tukiliit serve a huge variety of practical and spiritual purposes from navigation to marking snow depth, cache locations, good gathering and hunting spots, or good river crossings, to aiding in caribou hunting as human-like decoys, to forming a literal window onto notable places, to marking places of spiritual significance and ceremony, to serving as a memorial to tragic or memorable events.
It is interesting to think of cairns as a primary form of traditional Arctic architecture, which, though not formed into buildings for human habitation or daily use, makes the landscape livable.
You can read a lot more about Inuit cairns in Hallendy’s book or here.
Final Thoughts
What then can be said about the contemporary cairns built in present day parks and wilderness areas in the United States and other developed countries, like those where I worked in Alaska? They too likely share many of the same functions and meanings of cairns in these other regions of the world, marking key routes and locations, and even indicating intangible aspects of meaning, relation, and sacredness in the landscape, though not nearly as deeply or at such a level of sophistication as long-standing place-based hunting cultures like in Greenland.
In many parks and wilderness areas, cairns are officially constructed to mark trails through otherwise impossibly confusing boulder fields, while many of those developed by visitors are allowed to remain for similar reasons. In general, though, particularly in areas that are heavily visited, such as parks in California, Colorado, or other accessible and popular regions of the “lower 48” United States, the social context is radically different than that from which traditions of cairn building took place.
For one thing, there are so many visitors to some of these places that they would become quickly overrun with all forms of construction and litter without active efforts to curb and undo them.
For another, while in the present-day Arctic for the most part, and traditionally in most places, signs of humanity may have stood out against the landscape as a needed, useful, and comforting exception; now, in most of the world, the humanized is the rule, and if it weren’t for our concentrated and deliberate restraint in some places, it might not be possible anywhere to escape an overwhelming built and converted world, replete with the signs and solicitations of other humans. A landscape without contemporary cairns and other obvious signs of our fellows in this surrounding context is a rare offering of another possible way of approaching the world and its other inhabitants—it is a small window or doorway into which we can peer or pass through into another realm where we can see the world and ourselves a little differently, and hopefully bring some of that back into the other world that we live in day-to-day. Wilderness is in this sense a temporal and spatial break from the everyday human realm–it is a realizing and remaking of spirit. The sacred here manifests as absence rather than presence.
What then can be said about the contemporary cairns built in present day parks and wilderness areas in the United States and other developed countries, like those where I worked in Alaska? They too likely share many of the same functions and meanings of cairns in these other regions of the world, marking key routes and locations, and even indicating intangible aspects of meaning, relation, and sacredness in the landscape, though not nearly as deeply or at such a level of sophistication as long-standing place-based hunting cultures like in Greenland.
In many parks and wilderness areas, cairns are officially constructed to mark trails through otherwise impossibly confusing boulder fields, while many of those developed by visitors are allowed to remain for similar reasons. In general, though, particularly in areas that are heavily visited, such as parks in California, Colorado, or other accessible and popular regions of the “lower 48” United States, the social context is radically different than that from which traditions of cairn building took place.
For one thing, there are so many visitors to some of these places that they would become quickly overrun with all forms of construction and litter without active efforts to curb and undo them.
For another, while in the present-day Arctic for the most part, and traditionally in most places, signs of humanity may have stood out against the landscape as a needed, useful, and comforting exception; now, in most of the world, the humanized is the rule, and if it weren’t for our concentrated and deliberate restraint in some places, it might not be possible anywhere to escape an overwhelming built and converted world, replete with the signs and solicitations of other humans. A landscape without contemporary cairns and other obvious signs of our fellows in this surrounding context is a rare offering of another possible way of approaching the world and its other inhabitants—it is a small window or doorway into which we can peer or pass through into another realm where we can see the world and ourselves a little differently, and hopefully bring some of that back into the other world that we live in day-to-day. Wilderness is in this sense a temporal and spatial break from the everyday human realm–it is a realizing and remaking of spirit. The sacred here manifests as absence rather than presence.
