Cairn 14 was gone on August 22nd. It stood at the notch where the rim road dips toward the aspen pocket, eleven stones, roughly waist high, and I had photographed it four times since April. Now there is a scuffed patch of duff and the two base slabs, which are too heavy for one person to move alone. Somebody took it apart on purpose and did a tidy job of scattering the rest downslope.
My numbering only exists in this notebook. I started at the cattle guard on the north end and worked south, so Cairn 1 is a squat four-stone thing that anyone would walk past. By the end of last season I had 63 entries over about nine miles of rim. Twenty-one of those I would call navigational, meaning they sit at a place where the trail genuinely disappears into slickrock or matted oakbrush and a person could lose ten minutes finding the tread again.
The rest are what I have started calling company. Somebody sat down, liked the view, and stacked seven rocks. They cluster near the fire ring at the second overlook, sometimes six or eight within thirty feet of each other. Those get knocked over by weather or by boots within a month or two and nobody mourns them.
I have met three builders. A woman running cattle on the allotment told me she rebuilds four specific piles every June because the drift routes across the shale are otherwise invisible to a rider. A retired surveyor from Montrose adds a single flat capstone to anything he passes, which is how I can tell his work. And there was a kid, maybe nineteen, who had stacked eleven piles in a row along a hundred yards of open rock and could not explain why beyond saying it felt good.
Dismantling is its own habit. The land agency crew removes decorative piles during trail maintenance, which I understand, though last September they also took down Cairn 31, and that one marked the only sane descent through the ledge band. I rebuilt it in October with a heavier base and a broken juniper limb wedged flat under the bottom stone.
Navigating by them requires knowing which is which. Rule I use now: if a cairn is not visible from the previous cairn, do not trust it as part of a line. Real routes maintain sightlines. Decoration does not.
Measurements from September 3rd, walking north from the trailhead. Cairn 2, 41 cm. Cairn 7, 58 cm and leaning east. Cairn 9, missing since spring, no trace. Cairn 12, rebuilt by someone with better rocks than I have.
Next trip I want to photograph the whole line at the same hour so the shadows match.