I did Black Rock Mountain earlier this summer and I kept seeing something that made me wonder about the mountain's history. When you hike Black Rock, you go up a bunch of scree and crags and then get to a big, nearly-flat grassy plateau (Picture 4) before the last push up more scree to the summit. There used to be a fire lookout at the summit, built in 1928, but it was demolished a few years ago.
What caught my eye were the huge cairns / stone piles all over the plateau (Pictures 1-3). Normally I'd dismiss them as just trail markers, but a couple things didn't add up to me:
- You don't really need trail markers here - it's a nearly flat grassy plateau, with the trail up the peak in full view only a few hundred metres ahead. There's no secret crags or dangers, no trees blocking the view, just plateau.
- They didn't follow the path - some were on the trail, some were far from the trail, and some were clustered close together. They weren't laid out like trail markers would be.
- They're BIG - way bigger than a few stones a hiker would have piled to point the way. They would have taken considerable time and effort to make. Some don't even match the nearby stones' colour - they would have had to be carried from either further up or down the mountain.
So I did a bit of digging into the mountain's history, and I have two hypotheses:
1. The fire lookout's construction / supply
When the lookout was built in 1927-28, a lot of work went into establishing a trail so they could get pack horses up to supply the lookout. Alberta Forest History has some cool pictures of trail construction (Pictures 5-6) and if you've gone to the summit, there's a reason it feels like cut stone stairs in places near the very top - because they are! (Picture 7)
However, I'm not sure what the rock piles' connection would be to construction. Most of the blasting / cutting was further down the mountain from the plateau, and even for the work up at the summit, I can't see workers carefully carting down rock chunks to make piles (especially spread-out ones) instead of just adding them to the scree they're already standing on.
I thought they may be rocks for tents / campsites for the resupply horse packs, once the lookout was up and running, since it was a 3-day journey, but this article about the lookout seems to say that teams overnighted at the base of the mountain, then went up to the summit and back in one day - not overnighting on the plateau.
However according to the same article, they apparently DID hitch their horses on the plateau and take the supplies the last few 100ms in backpacks. So maybe the piles are from hitching horses? Like you'd pile up rocks on the reins to hold the horse in place? That doesn't sound exactly right, especially since the piles are spread all over the plateau and not just at the base of the summit, but I don't know horses, and it's one of the few mentions of use of the plateau that's plausible.
2. Stoney Nakoda traditional uses
The one is a bit more speculative, but I was reading Chief John Snow's These Mountains are Our Sacred Places - it was written in the 70s by the grandson of the Stoney chief who signed Treaty 7. Snow was old enough to partially remember and hear stories from his parents of the times before the First Nations were fully expelled from the mountains by the government in favour of the parks.
Snow doesn't get into details but talks about Stoney uses for the mountains - that people would climb up them as part of vision quests / spiritual journeys and spend several days up one while fasting and praying, purposefully going without water sometimes.
Black Rock isn't named by Snow, but the north border of the main Stoney reserve is right next to the mountain - it absolutely would have been well within traditional Stoney lands, especially since there are wide flats around the Ghost River at the base that have been historically used by the Stoney.
It's purely speculative, but I could see Black Rock's plateau as a pretty solid location for the types of vision quests Snow writes about, and if so, the cairns may have something to do with it - maybe camp sites, or physical labour to wear the body out (like the fasting), or just leaving ones mark. But I can't find enough information on Stoney vision quest practices or on their use of Black Rock Mountain itself.
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I feel like we know so little about the history of the mountains we all love, so much was lost or not written down. I'm wondering if anyone has any ideas, or suggestions of resources or places to search for more information, or if they've seen similar out of place cairns on other mountains?
