Table Rock: Sacred Ground, Building Stone, City Landmark
Near Boise, Idaho
Table Rock rises above the city's eastern edge, a flat-topped mesa of compressed sandstone three thousand six hundred fifty feet above sea level, about nine hundred feet above downtown. From the summit you can see the entire Boise Valley spread out below, the river a thin silver line threading through cottonwoods, the mountains rising beyond.
The rock has been part of human life here for thousands of years. For the Northern Shoshone, Table Rock was a sacred ceremonial and burial site long before Europeans arrived. When prison inmates quarried sandstone here in the eighteen nineties, they unearthed skeletal remains along with beads and bracelets, evidence of how long this formation has been a place people came to for significant purposes.
The geology explains both the quarrying and the view. The sandstone cap formed from lake sediments deposited in an ancient inland sea, with silica-rich hydrothermal water percolating up through cracks and cementing the sand grains into stone. That process happened somewhere between three million and eight million years ago. The result is a rock that cuts cleanly and resists weather, which is why builders have been pulling it out of this formation since the eighteen sixties.
The stone went into the territorial penitentiary first, then into dozens of buildings across the city, then into the Idaho State Capitol. It also went, as it turned out, into the Harkness Tower at Yale University in Connecticut, one of those quirks of the stone trade that connects a desert quarry to an Ivy League campus.
Today Table Rock is a public reserve with hiking trails to the top. The cross on the summit went up in nineteen fifty-six. And somewhere beneath the mesa, the sandstone still runs deep.
