Working at my desk, all is quiet, save for the steady snorfling and occasional chops-licking of my Cairn terrier Riley, who’s snoozing in his cozy bed below. It’s hard to imagine my grey-bearded doggo performing the job he was born to do: rooting unsuspecting vermin from beneath random piles of rocks — also known as his breed’s namesake: cairns.
Not that Riley is not, as one terrier fancier put it, “an innate barbarian, truculent and fearless.” I’ve seen my 13-pound boi casually lift a leg to lay claim to dogs 10 times his size. Once, he even stared down a bull moose on Dawn’s Trail. But the only thing Riley has rooted out of rocks is perhaps a half-empty Chicken of the Sea can someone carelessly tossed under a boulder near the picnic tables at City Park.
The rock piles called cairns have been formed by human hands for thousands of years. In Scotland, where the term originated, it’s traditional to carry a stone from the bottom of a hill to place on a cairn at the summit. Cairns typically served as markers for trails, mountain tops and even human souls. As a Scottish Gaelic blessing goes, “I’ll put a stone on your cairn.”
In recent times, cairns — the rock piles, not the dogs — have fallen on hard times. Literally. As in hikers are knocking them down. A Yosemite National Park social media post that went viral over the summer even went so far as to demonstrate exactly what to do during a close encounter of the cairn kind. Accompanying the post is a video of a park ranger laying waste to a pile of stones stacked higher than her flat-brimmed hat.
“Should you knock this over?? Yes!” the post’s caption reads. “According to Leave No Trace ethics when we recreate in wilderness spaces, our goal is to leave no signs of our impact on the land and respect other creatures living in it. Unfortunately, this dramatically oversized cairn is a mark of human impact and is distracting in a wilderness setting.”
But just as Yosemite was tearing cairns down, Arches and Canyonlands national parks were building them up. A spokesperson said cairns in those parks are much-needed route markers for the vast, variable and hard-to-navigate terrain. While Canyonlands and Arches staff asks visitors not to topple their purpose-built cairns, they also discourage visitors from creating their own monuments, which could be misleading for other hikers.
I experienced the indignity of it all first hand after riding the Cyn City trail last summer. The trail itself is a memorial to the legendary Park City trailbuilder Cyndi Schwandt, who died tragically in a 2019 mountain-biking accident. I never knew Cyndi, but could feel her presence down the entire length of the flowy descent. So it seemed fitting after riding it the first time to lay a rock on the small pile gathered at the end of the trail. I even paused to snap a pic of the thoughtful arrangement of coherent mineral aggregate. I thought it was beautiful.
The next week, I rode the trail again with a friend and reverently pointed out the small cairn. “You’re not supposed to do that,” he said, calmly kicking it over.
Tell that to an artist/environmentalist like Andy Goldsworthy. Inspired by land artists of the ’60s and ’70s like Robert Smithson, Goldsworthy began his artistic collaborations with nature in the craggy coastlines, dark moors and cairn-dotted glens of Scotland. He crafts his ephemeral installations out of ice, leaves, branches and, yes, even rocks, and documents them with stunning photography. His work illustrates the natural world within its own color, energy and transformative power.
“It’s not about art,” Goldsworthy said. “It’s about understanding that a lot of things in life do not last.” His works help us see Earth’s beauty while heightening our own ephemeral connection to it through birth, life, death and rebirth.
Of course, not all rock cairns are man-made. And yet they’re just as ephemeral as a Goldsworthy installation. These are formed by foxes, badgers and other small, furry prey who live beneath them.
Which is where Cairn terriers like my Riley come in. Clever enough to sniff out everything from a cairn-buried rat to a ham sandwich. Small enough to squeeze in and out of the toughest jams. But mostly, adorable enough to command attention from across a crowded street. Rarely a walk goes by where someone doesn’t shout, “Look, it’s Toto!”
Just like Dorothy’s little dog did in the Emerald City, I’m never surprised when Riley pulls back the curtain to reveal not a wizard or a fox or a badger, but my own magical sense of wonder at this hollow tree, that pile of crunchy fallen leaves or that stack of rocks. And maybe that’s what the cairn is all about. Helping us discover our own land of ahhs.