Arborglyphs, The Basque Writing on the Trees

From the eighteen eighties through the middle of the twentieth century, men came to the mountains of eastern Nevada from a small region on the border of Spain and France called the Basque Country. They came to herd sheep.

Sheep camps in the high country meant months of solitude: a herder, a flock, a dog, and a range of mountains. No English, often. No telephone. The herders moved their flocks through the aspen groves along the Snake Range each summer, camping beside springs, sleeping under trees, watching the same slopes for weeks at a time.

What they left behind was carved into the aspen bark. They called the practice nothing in particular; the scholars who study it call it arborglyph carving, and the carvings are called arborglyphs. A herder would take out a knife and cut into the smooth gray skin of an aspen tree. He might carve his name and the year. He might carve his hometown in the Basque Country, a depiction of the church there, a sheep, a fishing boat, a nude figure, a soccer team logo. He might carve comments about other herders who had camped at the same spring the previous summer, complaints about employers, fragments of verse.

The carvings are ephemeral. Aspen trees typically live around one hundred years, and as the trees that bear the carvings die, the record disappears. The University of Nevada, Reno, and Boise State University have been building a photographic and transcriptive database of arborglyphs across Idaho, Nevada, California, and Oregon. Great Basin National Park holds surviving examples in aspen groves along the lower portions of the scenic drive. Most visitors drive past without knowing what the smooth bark marks mean, or who made them, or what century they were made in, or what the name carved there was trying to remember.