Rock Cairns Quotes

Afterwards, I limped around gathering rocks and built a small crap cairn, burying the evidence before hiking on.

The Norwegian word for “cairn,” varde, comes from the Old Norse word varði, which means “attentiveness” or “vigilance.” The English word “cairn” means “heap of rocks.

Cairn Stone This is the rock he lifted to lay upon a cairn in a high place. This rock, warmed by the near sun, felt right, somehow, in his hand. He decided to carry it down to his mother, who lay in bed, recovering. It is so easy to please a mother. Just to think of her for a moment, from a high place, and to carry that thought to her in the form of a stone.

Through the spectacles of geology, terra firms becomes terra mobilis, and we are forced to reconsider our beliefs of what is solid and what is not. Although we attribute to stone great power to hold back time, to refuse its claims (cairns, stone tablets, monuments, statuary), this is true only in relation to our own mutability. Looked at in the context of the bigger geological picture, rock is as vulnerable to change as any other substance. Above all, geology makes explicit challenges to our understanding of time. It giddies the sense of here-and-now. The imaginative experience of what the writer John McPhee memorably called 'deep time' - the sense of time whose units are not days, hours, minutes or seconds but millions of years or tens of millions of years - crushes the human instant; flattens it to a wafer. Contemplating the immensities of deep time, you face, in a way that is both exquisite and horrifying, the total collapse of your present, compacted to nothingness by the pressures of pasts and futures too extensive to envisage. And it is a physical as well as a cerebral horror, for to acknowledge that the hard rock of a mountain is vulnerable to the attrition of time is of necessity to reflect on the appalling transience of the human body.

In May of 1861, Brigham and his entourage stopped at Mountain Meadows and stopped at the rock cairn that had been built there by U.S. soldiers as a monument to the victims. Atop the peak of the cairn stood a heavy wooden cross engraved with “Vengeance is mine: I will repay, saith the Lord.” Young regarded it for a moment, then read the inscription aloud with a slight change: “Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord: I have repaid.” He gave a Danite signal by raising his right arm, fist to the sky. His men understood. A horseman lassoed the cross and pulled it down, dragging it until it splintered to pieces. The others set to work and five minutes later not a single stone was left of the memorial.

Hookers evening primroses dotted one of the layered mesas; forests of cholla cactus filled another. I followed rock cairns as I fought the wind. In rock-less sandy areas, cairns changed to white-tipped stakes driven into the ground. On the far side of the dry riverbed, there were white sand verbena, and throughout the day I saw penstemon, phacelia, spectacle pod, short yuccas, claret cactus, and an orange mallow, much smaller in dry New Mexico than

For so long, the man he’d been had been buried under a cairn of grief, and now it was as if all the rocks had tumbled free, as if he’d somehow been alive all this time.

By some miracle the cairn remained untouched by the flames, solid as the day I’d built it, a tiny oasis amid the burn scar. I removed the cap rock. I placed the bone inside. I felt the enormity of his loss once more. The pain of it never does fade entirely, never will—no doubt it disfigured me in ways that will endure for what remains of my life—but at last I found a place to put it where it wouldn’t eat me alive. My devotion to his memory led me there, the place I venerate above all others on earth, my little voodoo shrine to the lost and the damned, as wild and remote as the country of grief itself.

HIKER GLOSSERY AT- Appalachian Trail - The most populated and most difficult terrain of the three longest trails in the USA Aqua Blazing- Canoeing instead of hiking a section of the trail in the Shenandoahs. Bear Cables- A system to easily hang up food bags. Bear bagging- Hanging food up high in a tree. Bivy Sack- A lightweight waterproof shelter that has bad condensation Blow Down- A fallen tree or limb blocking the trail Blue Blazer- A hiker that takes short cut trails or more scenic trails that lead back to the main trail Bushwhack- To hike where there is no trail /to clear a trail with a machete. CDT- The Continental Divide Trail - The most secluded and least populated of the three longest US trails. Cowboy Camping- to sleep on the ground with no shelter Cairn- Pile of rocks to depict where the trail is located when above treeline Day Hiker- Usually a novice who is out for the day or several days. DEET- A heavy duty bug spray. Drop Box- Food or gear sent by mail. Five Fingers - Shoes with toes. Flip-Flopper- A thru-hiker who hikes one way, then skips ahead to hike the opposite direction Gators- A piece of gear worn around the ankle to keep dirt from entering shoes Giardia- Parasites that cause diarrhea from drinking unclean water.

The countryside around us changed again. Now we were driving through forest. Sørland forests with mountain crags here and there among the trees, hills covered with spruce and oaks, aspen and birch, sporadic dark moorland, sudden meadows, flatland with densely growing pine trees. When I was a boy I used to imagine the sea rising and filling the forest so that the hilltops became islets you could sail between and on which you could bathe. Of all my childhood fantasies this was the one that captivated me most; the thought that you could swim over bus shelters and roofs, perhaps dive down and glide through a door, up a staircase, into a living room. Or just through a forest, with its slopes, cliffs, cairns, and ancient trees. At a certain point in childhood my most exciting game was building dams in streams, watching the water swell and cover the marsh, the roots, the grass, the rocks, the beaten earth path beside the stream. It was hypnotic. Not the mention the cellar we found in an unfinished house filled with shiny, black water we sailed on in two styrofoam boxes, when we were around five years old. Hypnotic. The same applied to winter when we skated along frozen streams in which grass, sticks, twigs, and small plants stood upright in the translucent ice beneath us. What had been the great attraction? And what had happened to it? Another fantasy I had at that time was that there were two enormous saw blades sticking out from the side of the car, chopping off everything as we drove past. Trees and streetlamps, houses and outhouses, but also people and animals. If someone was waiting for a bus they would be sliced through the middle, their top half falling like a felled tree, leaving feet and waist standing and the wound bleeding.

Many stories start long before they begin, and Brutha's story had its origins thousands of years before his birth. There are billions of gods in the world. They swarm as thick as herring roe. Most of them are too small to see and never get worshiped, at least by anything bigger than a bacteria, who never say their prayers and don't demand much in the way of miracles. They are the small gods - the spirits of places where two ant trails cross, the gods of microclimates down between the grass roots. And most of them stay that way. Because what they lack is belief. A handful, though, go on to greater things. Anything may trigger it. A shepherd, seeking a lost lamb, finds it among the briars and takes a minute or two to build a small cairn of stones in general thanks to whatever spirits might be around the place. Or a peculiarly shaped tree becomes associated with a cure for disease. Or someone carves a spiral on an isolated stone. Because what gods need is belief, and what humans want is gods. Often it stops there. But sometimes it goes further. More rocks are added, more stones are raised, a temple is built on the site where the tree once stood. The god grows in strength, the belief of its worshipers raising it upwards like a thousand tons of rocket fuel. For a very few, the sky's the limit. And sometimes, not even that.

The Gilkey Memorial is a grisly necessity because corpses rarely make it down the mountain in one piece. For Everest losses, families sometimes send a recovery team. This doesn't happen on K2. The Savage Mountain devours its victims during the long winter beteween climbing seasons. It encases the torsos in ice and grates them against the rocks, only to spit out the digested remains decades later, scattering limbs among the avalanche debris. When Art Gilkey's team gathered stones to honor their friend in 1953, they started a morbid tradition. To keep the campsites sanitary, climbers began using the memorial as a place to dispose of the fingers, pelvic bones, arms, heads, and legs found in the glacial melt. Burying these scraps under the Gilkey Memorial felt more respectful than leaving them to the ravens. For more than half a century, the memorial has been a place to caution the living and consecrate the dead. Mountaineers attempting K2 visit the site to remind themselves of what they are getting into......On hot days, the cairn stews with the scent of defrosting flesh, and the odor clings to mourners' hair and clothing.” (Buried in the Sky, p. 102).

IN THE DARK OF GAUNTLGRYM’S THRONE ROOM, A SHIFTING STONE STOLE THE quiet. Then came a grunt, and more sounds of rocks sliding against each other. A black-bearded dwarf crawled from under the pile, then reached back and grabbed at something he had left behind, grunting with exertion as he tried to extricate it. “Durned thing’s stuck,” he muttered, and with a great tug, he pulled free a most curious helmet, one set with a long and oft-bloodied spike. His effort sent him flying over backward to crash against the stones of the nearest cairn, where he lay on his back as the dust settled. “Durn it,” he cursed, seeing the trouble he had caused, and he rolled to his feet and began replacing the dislodged stones. “Don’t mean to be desecratin’ yer tomb …” The words caught in his throat, and the rocks fell from his hands. There in the disturbed tomb before him was a curious helm, with a single curving horn, the other having long before been broken away. The dwarf fell to his knees and dug the helm free, and saw too the face of the dead dwarf interred within. “Me king,” Thibbledorf Pwent breathed. Nay, not breathed, for creatures in the state of Thibbledorf Pwent did not draw breath. He fell back to his bum, staring in shock, his mouth wide in a silent scream. If he’d had a mirror, or a reflection that would actually show up in a mirror, Thibbledorf Pwent might have noticed his newest weapon: canine fangs.

surely a cairn like this one must have been significant. I wondered what sort of man – or woman, perhaps? – had lain here, leaving no more than an echo of their bones, so much more fragile than the enduring rocks that sheltered them.