"I am here"
A mountaintop, a cairn, and a surprise ending
One July Saturday, I decided to find the summit of the mountain that looms over my town. It was the first summer of the pandemic, which had caused me to stare endlessly out the window of my home office at the peak. Rounded, gentle, and forested, it is neither the tallest mountain in the area nor the most scenic. There’s no trail to the top. The only people who attempt it are stalwart locals determined to reverse their everyday view. I was surely one of them.
I had a vague memory of trying this once before, almost thirty years previously when I was new in town and wanting to claim things. I remember being disappointed, thinking I must be at the top but gaining no sense of accomplishment. The lodgepole pines were so dense that I had no view. The slope was so gentle that I experienced no summit. Why climb three thousand feet to wander around a set of trees little different from the forested thickets just off the highway?
But the memory was frustratingly imprecise. I hadn’t taken any pictures or written it up in my journal. Had I really been there? Maybe now was the time to find out.
A developed trail does ascend 80 percent of the way, before veering off toward more interesting landscapes to the south. At the trailhead, a gate fences cattle off these lands. But someone had left it open. Cows crowded the trail. My dog was nervous, and I’d forgotten a leash for the neighbor’s dog who was accompanying us. Soon I encountered a jogger, and then a group of hikers who announced that their dog was not friendly. Then came the long stretches of steep uphill through thick, monotonous forests. I remembered why I didn’t often ascend this far.
Eventually I reached the place where the trails turns to the south. I was pleased that I so easily recognized it. The spot was rockier than most, less treed, and I saw a clear path to cross a saddle and start climbing the mountain itself. One last group of mountain bikers passed me—I had to hold onto the dogs, who were bred to herd sheep and find bikes the next best thing—and then I walked away from civilization. It was hot and I was weary, but now the real adventure could begin.
I scampered up the steep hill to a false summit. It had nice views to the southeast—a valley that this mountain hid from town. But I was more focused on the views to the north, to the real summit. I would face a steep drop to another sandy saddle, and then an even steeper climb, with no trail to guide me around deadfall, or away from cliff faces or scree fields. Should I turn around now? It was almost 2:30 p.m., but I hadn’t started until late morning and had seven hours left of daylight. I had plenty of water and trail mix. My phone’s GPS function would allow me to know when I’d reached the summit—a major improvement over my last attempt—and it had plenty of remaining battery.
As I descended the saddle, I decided that my memories must have been a dream. The land felt unfamiliar, rocky and sandy. How could this soil have supported the density of trees that I remembered? It was also much more up-and-down than I remembered… unless my ideas of up-and-down had become exaggerated by old age. I then ascended through dead trees, many of them fallen but some still standing—could disease have recently destroyed that thick canopy I remembered? Then I got to the summit and lived in the moment instead of the past.
It felt obvious: that rock there was the highest point. I had views through the trees to the west, north, and east. Town felt like it was right below me, with its north-south street grid weirdly offset from the shape of the valley. Then I saw the cairn.
Cairns are a surprisingly controversial topic in outdoor-recreation circles. Traditionally, piles of rocks have been useful guideposts in alpine or desert areas where trails might be hard to find, and without trees to blaze. I have many fond memories of scanning a landscape, appreciating its beauty, then scanning it again to ask “Where the hell am I supposed to go next?” and—once I’m looking for it—seeing an unobtrusive cairn that answers my question. I was once told that hiker etiquette required adding another rock to a cairn, as a way of paying it forward.
It turns out that stacking rocks on top of each other is a deeply satisfying activity—perhaps even a form of art—but potentially fraught. Cairns get built next other cairns. Or in places where the trail is obvious. Or in places where a trail doesn’t exist. The cairn-building impulse becomes less of an obligation to help future trail-users negotiate a problem that you encountered, and more of an egotistical celebration, “I am here!”
In well-used areas, people who seek to admire nature instead are forced to look at the ways that their predecessors manipulated nature. In riparian areas, especially, picking up all those rocks to stack on top of each other ends up affecting the ecological corners that used to thrive under the rocks. Now hiker etiquette says: “Follow cairns. Don’t build them.” In the Adirondacks, you need a permit to build a cairn.
So I had conflicted emotions when I saw the cairn atop the mountain. It was a useful way of pointing out the summit, reassuring me that I had achieved my goal. It was far off the beaten path, likely seen by only a dozen or two people every year. But it was very much a manipulation of nature, constructed by people who wanted to say, “I am here!”
As I approached the cairn, my reaction almost turned to judgmental disgust. There was trash in the cairn! A plastic bottle. Was I going to have to carry it down the mountain for those lazy, littering predecessors of mine? Then I realized it was not trash: it was the container for a logbook. Another expression of traditional hiker culture: when you reach a summit, especially an obscure one, you honor the occasion. You jot down your name, and maybe some emotions. And you get to see who has shared your passion in the past.
In my case, that included many of my hiker-friends in this small, obscure mountain town. I felt like I was reading membership rolls of an exclusive club. Indeed our town has a formal hiking club, and a few years previously several of them had summitted together. They noted the date and their ages—which I found a gossipy delight. So that’s how old Marlene is!
The bottle also contained a pencil. I could add my own name, and the date. My age? Maybe not. But I could include myself in these membership rolls. I could declare, “I am here!”
Was that what I wanted? Was that the right relationship to this mountain? Would some future hiker smile at seeing my name? Would I be up here in another 20 or 30 years, having again forgotten the details of my previous journey—wouldn’t I appreciate the evidence of my younger self? Or would adding my name to the list simply be an expression of ego, when the point of the hike should be the experience itself?
In Greek tragedies, the Deus ex machina plot device involved a god coming in to rescue the protagonist with a surprising resolution. Today, Deus ex machina plots are often criticized as contrived, overly simplistic, or indicative of bad playwriting. But at the time, audiences generally liked them. The appearance of the gods provoked wonder, and highlighted a moral message.
In this story, the Deus ex machina is a forest fire. Twenty-three months after my visit to the summit, the whole mountain burned. I have not been back up there since—it would be a hot and miserable trip. But I imagine the cairn survived. And the plastic bottle didn’t. The logbook must have burned, the membership rolls vanished. If I need to remember that sense I had on the summit—the feeling of “I was here!”—I need to rely on my memory, rather than some manipulation I may or may not have made to the natural environment.
To be clear, I no longer remember whether I added my name to the logbook or not. What I remember is being faced with the choice, a dilemma, two diverging paths that would reflect who I was as a person, how I related to the world around me. It feels weird to say that having a choice was more important to me than which option I actually chose. But by rendering such actions meaningless, the fire, the Deus ex machina, has eliminated the weirdness.
What mattered was the existence of the choice. The natural world provoked wonder. It highlighted a moral message. And it rescued me with a surprise ending.
Discussion:
Welcome to those of you arriving here from Chris La Tray’s delightful post at “An Irritable Metis.” Every week in this space I tell a story about people and nature. Some are personal, like this week’s; others are historical, like the one Chris cited about Howard Zahniser. All my content is always free, but I’ll continually bug you: Won’t you consider becoming a paid subscriber?
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