Colorado Trail Cairns

Title: Cairns

General Information about Item:

  • Material and Customary Folklore (Tradition)
  • Informant: Sam Lincoln
  • Date Collected: 9 November 2019

Informant Data:

  • Sam Lincoln is a 21 year old college student studying mechanical engineering at Arizona State University. He was born in Wisconsin and raised in Arizona. He began overnight backpacking when he was 15 and hiked the Colorado Trail after he graduated from high school in 2016. He enjoys archery and playing video games. Sam is the twin brother of Rachel Lincoln, who collected this item.

Contextual Data:

  • Historical context: Humans have built cairns for thousands of years to memorialize the dead, track the calendar, and create landmarks. Now, cairns have become a fixture of hiking trails to show the way.
  • Social context: Hikers on all lengths of trails build cairns to leave a reminder of their presence. Though cairns serve practical purpose, popular trails usually have many more than necessary because building cairns is a tradition that helps hikers feel connected to the land.

Item:

  • A cairn is a man-made stack of rocks used to mark a trail route. The rocks are stacked and balanced in a manner that would not occur naturally, so they can easily be identified by hikers looking for a trail. Building cairns is a tradition across nearly all hiking trails.

Associated file:

Transcript:

  • “Cairns are just piles of rocks stacked up to mark the trail in places where you can’t really put a sign or there are no signs so people don’t get lost…Just a basic pyramid structure, just pile rocks up in a way that would not normally occur in nature so it’s pretty obvious that someone did it for, like, a purpose—which was to mark the trail.”

Informant’s comments:

  • The tallest cairn Sam saw on the Colorado Trail was about two feet tall.

Collector’s comments:

  • Unlike carving your name on trees or rocks, cairns are a memento hikers can leave that doesn’t irreversibly disrupt nature.

Collector: Rachel Lincoln

Image result for cairn

Tags/Keywords:

  • Cairn, Colorado Trail, Tradition, Material Folklore

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *