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Rockin' the Backcountry

By David Feela

The first time I hiked a trail in canyon country almost 30 years ago, I had never seen a cairn.

In Minnesota where I was raised, if anyone planned to use rocks as markers, they'd have painted them white and lined them up along the driveway. I'd like to think I was not the only newcomer to the desert Southwest to be confused by a pile of rocks, but it's possible.

Since then I have hiked many trails and come to appreciate these stacked rocks as a subtle system of canyon turn signals. Most of the time when a hiker comes upon a cairn, the next one is visible in the near distance. This is not, however, the case in deep backcountry. Here a hiker can easily get lost, owing to the way the native rocks used to assemble cairns blend in with the rocks around them, and also to the tendency for the human mind to wander aimlessly while the body trudges along the trail.

My mind, for instance, wanders quite a bit. Once on a hike to Fisher Towers near Moab, I took a wrong turn and nearly ended up stuck on all that slick rock after dark. The guide book called it a "day hike", which meant I should have started in the morning, not in the late afternoon. But how long could it take to walk 4.2 miles? The map estimated walking time at around 2.5 hours, and the book described the location as a "Popular, easy to follow trail."

I missed a cairn about two miles out and wandered at least another mile before realizing the only stacked rocks in the distance were far too large to be cairns. They might have been the monumental structures known as the Fisher Towers, though I never found out. The sun had already dragged huge shadows out from under the rocks, changing the landscape into an alternate reality. By the time I'd made it back to the last cairn I remembered passing, the sun had melted into the horizon. I had no flashlight, no companion, and no sense. Luckily, I followed the correct rocks this time and they took me back to my car, where it served as a sort of mechanical cairn abandoned in the parking lot, a perfect pile of junk to leave behind just in case park personnel were called to organize a search and rescue.

One other reason I get lost so often is because the desert Southwest has a noteworthy cairn planted in a place not plotted on any map.

When Ed Abbey died, his friends - sworn to secrecy - spirited his body away and buried it illegally on public land somewhere in the canyon country that Abbey loved. When I come upon a healthy pile of rocks in some difficult and inaccessible area, I tell myself, Don't worry, it's just another cairn erected by thoughtful people to lead me to safety, but a tiny part of me still walks around it, looking for the skeletal remains of a foot or hand that might be sticking out from between a couple stones. And I say to myself, Ed, if you're under there, just stay put.

Then I turn and hike briskly away in virtually any direction.