M. and I were poking around in the Wet Mountains two days ago, at the site of a now-vanished picnic ground that I think dated from the 1920s creation of campgrounds and picnic grounds under the guidance of landscape architect Arthur Carhart.
Here he launched his vision of national forest recreation for people driving Model T Fords — as opposed to arriving by train at big resort hotels in national parks.
I wrote some posts about that, so if you want the history, go here.
This site, however, was apparently a victim of Reagan-era Forest Service budgets, where recreation was de-emphasized and the message to the San Isabel National Forest was "get the cut out," in other words, sell timber. Back then, there were more sawmills in the area. Now there are not.
When I started visiting the area in the early 1980s, my friends referred to the "[Blank] Picnic Ground" as a real place, even though there was nothing there but a capped-off well.
But Amber, whoever she is or was, must have liked the place.
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| Amber came with Aaron . . . |
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| . . . and Amber came with William. I don't know the sequence. |
Assuming it was the same Amber. I like to think so. The trees are barely a yard apart.
The technical term is "arborglyphs." Quaking aspen is a good species for such carving. (If you do it now, it's vandalism, but if you did it a century ago, it is a historical record of American diversity.)
A lonely sheepherder mourns a lost love by carving a poem to her in aspen bark. A Cherokee man, forced from his home and leaving on the trail of tears buries his possessions at the foot of a tree, marking the tree so he can find it later. A young couple celebrate their love by carving their initials in a nearby sapling. The scars left in the bark of trees by these activities are called arborglyphs, literally "tree writing", and the study of these markings is revealing much about our history. . . .Another common source of arborglyphs were the young Basque and Irish who immigrated to the United States in the early 1900s. Many went to work as sheepherders in remote mountain meadows, and carved poems, names, dates, faces and other images telling of their lonely, isolated lives into the Aspen trees. Some of the most famous Basque arborglyphs are found in Southern Oregon,
There is a digital archive of aspen carvings from southwestern Colorado, and also a book, Speaking Through the Aspens: Basque Tree Carvings in California and Nevada.
So does Amber count as "history" or "vandalism"?
2 comments:
Years ago while Elk Hunting I went down a heavily forested deep valley in a certain Wyoming mountain range. As I did, I began to encounter aborglyphs. At the bottom, there were a collection that were religious in theme, clearly carved by a Hispanic man, and probably by a Hispanic sheepherder. As I moved up the valley, they started to become dedicated to a named woman, with a Spanish name. By mid-valley, where they ended, they were female nudes. Assuming one artist (not a safe assumption), the question in my mind has always been whether they evolved from lust to longing to devotion, or the other way around?
The Wet Mountains were never sheep country, to my knowledge, but the Sangre de Cristo range was, at least into the 1960s. There are some classic sheepherder carvings there too, including one on the North Taylor Creek Trail that has been published several places.
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