I walk closer. I look to make sure no one is watching and then jog to the top of the rocky ridge and then down, under the chain fence, past the Caution: Beware of Falling sign, and, finally, straight to the walls of ice.
Perhaps the most famous of the cairn exploration stories was the search for Sir John Franklin’s lost cairns on Baffin Island. In 1845 fifty-nine-year-old English Royal Navy officer John Franklin and 128 of his men sailed from Greenhithe, England, to Baffin Island on two ships, the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, hoping to traverse the last untraveled section of the Northwest Passage to find a westward route from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean. By the time Franklin’s crew sailed, the Northwest Passage was a route that had been searched for unsuccessfully for almost three hundred years, including attempts by Martin Frobisher, Henry Hudson, and James Cook.
A mere six years after Franklin’s expedition began, a first route across the Northwest Passage would be discovered, but this wouldn’t be by John Franklin or by his officers or his men. Despite being a celebrated and experienced explorer, Franklin never returned to England. His ship was last sighted by another only two months after it had left Greenhithe and before it had made it into the tip of the Northwest Passage.
By 1848 search-and-rescue parties were sent to Baffin Island to search for cairns or any other marks of the lost ship. The search continued for some years, with as many as thirteen boats at once looking for traces of Franklin’s ship or crew near Baffin Island and the parts of the Northwest Passage that followed. In 1854 one explorer, John Rae, brought back stories from Inuit about the ship’s dying party, including the tale that Franklin’s men had, in the end, resorted to cannibalism. People in England didn’t believe Rae or his sources and the idea that Englishmen would resort to cannibalism, though, and Rae’s name was blacklisted, some of his own maps even then credited to another explorer.
It was in 1859 that the first reliable trace of Franklin’s voyage was found. That year another explorer, Royal Navy lieutenant William Hobson, discovered several cairns on King William Island, built by Franklin’s shipmates. Inside one of the cairns was buried a tin can with a paper message:
28th of May, 1847
H.M. Erebus & Terror wintered in the ice in Lat. 70˚ 05´ N, Long. 98˚ 23´ W
Having wintered in 1846–1847 at Beechey Island in Lat 74˚ 43´ N. Long. 91˚ 39´ 15” W. After having ascended Wellington Channel to Lat. 77˚, and returned by the west side of Cornwallis Island
Sir John Franklin commanding the expedition.
All well.
As David Williams notes in his book Messengers in Stone, all was not well for long. The note in the cairn was updated to add that eleven months later the ships were stuck in ice, and already Sir John Franklin and several other crew members had died:
April 25, 1848—H.M. ships ‘Terror’ and ‘Erebus’ were deserted on the 22nd April, 5 leagues N.N.W. of this, having been beset since 12th September, 1846. The officers and crews, consisting of 105 souls, under the command of Captain F. R. M. Crozier, landed here in lat. 69˚ 37´ 42˝ N., long. 98˚ 41´ W. Sir John Franklin died on the 11th June, 1847; and the total loss by deaths in the expedition has been to this date 9 officers and 15 men.
In recent years there has been a move to stop people from adding cairns to wild areas or to altering the cairns that are already there. Park rangers and naturalists are concerned that the building of additional cairns can disrupt the landscape, causing soil erosion, changing the habitats that many insects, animals, and plants live among, and leaving a definite trace of human intervention in the wild, marring the experience of wilderness hikes and climbs for other travelers who will one day come.
There’s also a concern that unauthorized cairns might misdirect hikers and backpackers, especially in bad weather. In “A Natural and Social History of Cairn Building and Maintenance,” Michael Gaige offers the study of an Arcadia National Park ranger, Charles Jacobi, as evidence for the trend of changing cairns. Between 2002 and 2003 Jacobi studied the cairns in Arcadia, noting their movement and modification day by day. Even with informational signs asking hikers not to build or move cairns, Jacobi found that on average, 23 to 39 percent of cairns on popular hiking trails are altered every five days. “The cairns on top of Dorr and Sargent mountains are twenty feet wide and eight to ten feet high,” he said in an interview. “It would fill my office. And all those rocks came from somewhere on the mountain. All of them at one time served as a habitat for plants to grow around and spiders and other invertebrates to get cover…. I think most people don’t think about that, but I do.”
Other hikers and naturalists disagree, seeing cairn-building as a profound and participatory act of meaning-making, that to outlaw the practice of building cairns means to lose something of the helpful, communal nature of exploration, to regulate—too much—the wild. In the last several years cairn building has even become its own form of temporary art. British land artist Chris Drury constructs cairns of carefully sculpted and placed rocks in a variety of landscapes. In one installation, Covered Cairn in Langeland, Denmark, Drury built a dome of woven sticks on top of a stack of glacial rocks; in photographs, snow falls on the edges of the dome, making the cairn look like it’s ensconced in fog. Andy Goldworthy, too, has recently set up installations of cairns in England and Australia. His rock statue Strangler Cairn famously cost the Australian government nearly $700,000. Goldsworthy used hand-cut pieces of granite and slate in the ten-foot installation. He planted a fig tree inside that would eventually overtake the stones around it, an attempt to portray both the beauty and the violence of nature.
Of course, it’s not only stones scoring landscapes either. There are orange blazes throughout many trails in North America, black or red x’s in much of Europe. In Germany, some trails are given their own logos: witches’ hats or wine bottles or bolded trail names fixed or sprayed onto important directional points. Before the 1785 Land Ordinance, people in the United States delineated land boundaries and even paths by notching with an axe trees along the perimeter. They would walk back to these trees every year to reaffirm their grasp on the places where they lived and worked. As Kent C. Ryden notes, in Mapping the Invisible Landscape, these premapped borders were called “witness trees.”
I walk along the glacial ice for some distance before realizing that I haven’t—in any way—recorded the spot where I’d climbed down. Sometimes I leave two sticks in an “X” on some early point on the trail or take a photograph that I can look back on of some significant navigational detail. It’s a basic tenet of responsible hiking: mark any turns; take note of important landmarks; don’t forget where you’ve come from.
This day, drifting along in my own thoughts in the unsteady landscape, I’ve done none of those things. Though I can still hear the river and see climbers, much higher up, making their way along the crest of the mountain, near the very tip of the glacier’s ice forms, I can’t remember what the ice looked like in the place where I first studied it or even where I left the Caution: Beware of Falling sign. The tunnels of blue and long expanses of densely packed snow have already begun to run together in my memory. I remember noticing as I walked that each view I saw was different than the last, but not with the sort of clarity that marks a difference between their determinate edges. I realize too that I can’t remember exactly when I last saw someone walking or hiking nearby. There was a family taking photographs when I first walked down to the walls of ice, and I’d seen some young guys clambering down the same initial path I had. We’d diverged at some point, though I hadn’t noticed when or at what spot.
I consider continuing anyway, to see what’s just up ahead, if there’s a better view of the valley I came from, or possibly a clearer path back to the parking lot where the trail started. My friends and I haven’t set a meeting time, though, and I don’t want to delay or worry them, so I turn back and begin walking roughly in the direction in which I think I’ve come.
After a few minutes of walking, I decide to try scaling a sma
ll ledge. It’s gray and beveled and oddly shaped, almost like a horseshoe, the top edge of the ledge smooth and jutting out over air but the bottom cracked and pitted. I grab the top of the ledge with both hands and, in one quick motion, hoist myself onto it and then stand up. From the top of that rock I can see several other ledges, like stepping stones, but all six or eight feet above my head. There doesn’t appear to be any path I can reasonably get to, without straight vertical climbing. I jump back down and walk farther in the direction I’ve come, but I can’t find anything else to climb. Mostly, the uneven walls of rock are too high or too loose to safely scale.
Finally, I notice a pile of scree—broken stones—that seems to jog my memory. The stones are of all different sizes and angles, much like what you see at the very top of most mountains. I start walking slowly up the pile, but the stones aren’t steady, and so as much ground as I’ve gained, I almost immediately lose, slipping right back down. I decide to move a bit faster; I stride and scramble up the pile, causing small avalanches of tiny stone and dust with the weight of my feet, but it works; I make progress. After a minute or two, I get to the top of the pile of stones and find level ground—a broad, flat expanse of rock—just beyond it.
The sky is a bright, almost crystal, blue, and I can see the glacier even more clearly in the distance. There are no people though and no fences, just melting snow and a theater of rock, lining the high ledge.
Sir John Franklin wasn’t the first to sail the HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, looking to traverse unexplored lands. These same two ships were used only four years earlier by Sir James Clark Ross in what’s now known as the Ross expedition to Antarctica.
In October 1839 the ships set out from England to Tasmania and then to Antarctica, looking to discover the South Magnetic Pole. On January 1, 1841, Ross and his men arrived in the Antarctic Circle. Sailing through open seas and ice, the expedition discovered the Ross Sea, the Ross Ice Shelf, Victoria Land, and two volcanoes, Mount Erebus and Mount Terror.
In his personal narrative of the expedition, Robert McCormick, the expedition’s doctor, naturalist, and geologist, would write of discovering Mount Erebus:
Thursday, January 28, 1841.—We were startled by the most unexpected discovery, in this vast region of glaciation, of a stupendous volcanic mountain in a high state of activity. At ten a.m., upon going on deck, my attention was arrested by what appeared at the moment to be a fine snowdrift, driving from the summit of a lofty, crater-shaped peak, rising from the centre of an island (apparently) on the starboard-bow.
As we made a nearer approach, however, this apparent snowdrift resolved itself into a dense column of black smoke, intermingled with flashes of red flame-emerging from a magnificent volcanic vent, so near the South Pole, and in the very centre of a mighty mountain range encased in eternal ice and snow.
In the end, the Ross expedition didn’t make it to the magnetic pole. Ross himself, though, did make it to the North Magnetic Pole, where he constructed a cairn and added to it a British flag. He was also the first to set out on an expedition to search for the lost John Franklin and his own former ships.
Between Krossbu and Turtagro—two of the highest elevation areas near the Jostedalsbreen Glacier—there is a ten-kilometer stretch of three hundred cairns, each with a metal pole set into the rocks to help travelers go from one point to the next on the high, cold plateau. Until the famed 2009 Full City oil spill in another city in Norway, Molen—the Norwegian word for cairn—more than two hundred cairns of varying sizes rested on the local shoreline. These cairns, my Norwegian friends tell me, have been there for centuries. They once indicated graves for warriors, lone roads across the high mountains, or the clearest path along the shore of the sea.
I didn’t get to see the cairns at Molen during my time in Norway, but I did make it to the highway of cairns between Krossbu and Turtagro. I was with friends, Tim and Annie, and their two children that day; they were visiting from Manchester and had already driven twice that afternoon into the snowy mountains but offered to go one more time and to take me along.
We layered in wool socks and sweaters and the closest things we could find to winter jackets, and then Tim drove us up the mountains, past the tree line and the browning grass and the herds of wandering sheep, to the place where the cairns began, one stone stack after another. We could see the high mountains up there, almost from every angle, our car a satellite rotating between them. At one point, the snow in one of these passes was several feet taller than the car. A single path had been sliced through it, just wide enough for a road.
When we got to the drive’s highest point, Tim parked the car on the side of the road and we all got out. There were dips and rises in the land around us and mountains off in the distance. A cold wind cut across the open space. Though it was summer, the ground was mostly frozen, with a few patches of mud and a thin layer of snow covering the rocky outcrops and the high, treeless plain. There was a dark, narrow lake not far from where we had stopped, but otherwise the landscape was cast in shades of brown, gray, and white.
While the kids made snowballs to throw at each other, I walked up the spine of a small hill. It was only fifteen or twenty feet higher than where the others were, but I could feel the air through my jacket on top of it and could hear it moving too, though there was nothing in that wide, barren landscape to rustle. Low, thick clouds hung over the tops and sides of the mountains, and a fog was coming in from the east. There were no people other than us, no cars, no cabins, no houses or hotels or churches. In the shadow of the mountains, on that high alpine plain, there was us and there were small piles of rocks, of varying sizes and heights, all across the land.
I’ll read somewhere later that these particular cairns—which follow an east–west route all the way across the mountains—were set up as “guideposts” for farmers and tradesmen crossing the dangerous pass. It wasn’t until the nineteenth century that the cairns began to be visited as an attraction rather than used as utility, and it wasn’t until 1938 that two hundred young men used “pickaxe, spade, crowbar and wheelbarrow” to construct the highest mountain road in northern Europe, in the place where there were only stacks of stones before.
I walk along the flat ledge, unsure where exactly I’m going but realizing that if I move in the right direction, this makeshift path will probably lead down, maybe to the wooden boardwalk or the muddy trail, to the long glacial-fed lake, the parking lot, to the highway and the handful of cars that travel on it, or to the low green trees just ahead of where I stand.
I’ve hiked often enough and taken enough wrong turns not to worry too much, not as long as I’m in a clearing or somewhere with a fair bit of open air. In the woods, losing one’s way feels more perilous; even if villages or towns or cities aren’t far, there’s a sense sometimes of the trees closing in on you; the same place that minutes before felt like a solace can suddenly seem like it’s engulfing, muffling the light and air and sounds of whatever you’re looking for, or whoever might be looking for you. It’s different in the open air; there’s so much more possibility of seeing and being seen, even if you’re in the middle of somewhere that’s nearly silent.
It’s warmed up some, and so I take off my jacket and stuff it in my backpack; I take a drink of water from the bottle I’d filled up earlier while I was sitting at the edge of the river that joins the glacier and the lake. Though it’s been an hour or more since then, the water is still cold. After a long drink, I put the bottle back into my backpack too and walk on, concentrating, this time, on paying attention to what’s around me: the shades of gray of specific rocks, the angle of the mountains behind and beyond me, the shapes of blue ice in the distance.
Occasionally, the ledge seems to split, the large rock breaking into smaller pieces or joining with other massive granite shelves. I keep walking until soon one of these shelves begins to gradually lead upward. It’s just a little higher than where I’d been before, but this time the ledge breaks into a wide clearing. It slopes slightly, but
the view is suddenly open, straight to the steep bank of the mountain ahead. There’s sun too, sweeping across the expanse of rock.
When I was a child, my father used to read me a story about cairns. They weren’t called cairns, but I realize now that’s what they were. A young boy and girl in that story were tasked with finding a lost prince, who was buried underground under a witch’s enchantment. To save the prince—and the world itself from the witch’s evil schemes—the children must remember four landmarks, four signs that they’ve been given: watching for an old friend who can help them along their journey, finding a ruined city of giants, seeing a message written in stone and following its instructions, and knowing the lost prince by a phrase that he says.
The children, at the end of the story, do discover the lost prince but only after significant lapses of memory where their own desires, sharp smells of food, and bright invitations by the cunning witch and even trying-to-be-helpful strangers make the lights of their memory seem dim and hazy. The signs are not quite what the children thought they might look like, and it becomes tiring, at points, to continually recite them.
The story was fitting for my father and I to read, both of us having the worst memories in our family, forgetting names and places, sometimes the events of whole weeks or summer vacations. For some reason, the story of the boy and the girl mattered in a way that the other stories did not. I thought often about that boy and girl and what had been required of them in order to find the prince and save the kingdom. Long after the book was over, late at night, lying awake in my bed, I’d ask myself, If I were one of those children, would I have seen the signs?
Dispatches from the End of Ice Page 17