While hiking in Great Basin National Park, you find relief from the sun under a shady grove of aspen. A cool breeze rustles through the heartshaped leaves as you loosen your pack and take a sip of water. Soon you notice the image of a bird engraved in the delicate white bark of a large aspen. Further inspection reveals dozens of carvings in the grove—names, dates, political slogans, sheep, houses, and yes, even the figure of a naked woman. Should you alert the nearest ranger to these acts of vandalism? Probably not. Although carving trees is prohibited in the national parks, most of these images were rendered years before the park was even created.
The parks of the Southwest are well known for petroglyphs carved into rockface by ancient peoples, many of which illustrated hunting and wild beasts. Lesser known are these carvings in the Great Basin and other mountainous parks of the West, commonly associated with sheepherders.
“Aspen carvings, also known as dendroglyphs, arborglyphs, and aspen art, are an important record of an area’s historic past,” says Joann Blalack, cultural resources manager at Great Basin. Joxe Mallea-Olaetxe, an arborglyph expert at the University of Nevada, refers to such carvings as “history growing on trees.”
From the mid-19th century through the late 20th century, sheepherders in search of prosperity migrated to the area from Chile, Mexico, Peru, and the Basque region of Europe, which straddles France and Spain. They carved messages into trees as a means of communication, treating the trunks as an early form of paper—in more ways than one.
For the lonely herders, carving their names, villages, and countries of origin became a source of pride and tradition. Arborglyphs could also be humorous—sheepherders often competed to carve the most outrageous statement or the most alluring female figures. But the carvings were often quite practical, too; some contain the time and place of a planned rendezvous.
It might seem a peculiar mode of communication, but for sheepherders stranded high in the mountains for long periods of time, there weren’t many other options. The only human a sheepherder saw from June to September, aside from the occasional fisherman or hiker, was the camp tender who came once a week with supplies and the mail.
A herder’s sole companions were his dog, a knife, and a rifle, which helped him protect the flock from coyotes and other predators. Herders brought their flocks to the low desert or alpine meadows to feed, so their lives were dictated by the seasons and available pasture. With crisp September weather, sheepherders might get a day or two in town to sell their lambs. But during the winter they lived in a sheep wagon, and during the summer months, they often called a tent home.
Despite the fact that sheepherding played a vital role in Western history, few people know much about it. After sheepmen and cattlemen struggled for control of pasture and water in the mid-1800s, cowboys became mythological figures, while sheepherders were all but forgotten. Very little information about these immigrants or their activities exists today. “The tree carvings constitute another good example of how mainstream history has [overlooked] immigrants and minorities,” says Mallea-Olaetxe. But many cultural resource managers are trying to change that, by illuminating the details of the sheepherders’ colorful lives.
Blalack herself has been hard at work recording dendroglyphs at Great Basin in recent months. In 2006 she organized a survey of Strawberry Creek to record aspen art that was in danger of collapsing under heavy snow pack from the previous two winters. With funding from the National Park Service, surveyors were able to photograph hundreds of carvings.
But the Strawberry Creek survey documented only one area, and many experts consider each drainage unique. Blalack would like to survey the entire west side of the park, but she’s in a race against time: Aspen trees live only 80 to 100 years. Mallea-Olaetxe estimates that as many as 99 percent of the images carved by herders in the 1800s have already been lost forever.
The aspen’s short life-span isn’t the only threat to the carvings. Fire-suppression policies throughout the West have left a lot of dead vegetation and fuel wood on the forest floor. A fire could have a catastrophic effect on Great Basin’s aspen groves, some of which date back to the 1920s and ’30s.
People often ask how the carvings can be protected, but little can be done to reverse natural forces. “The only thing you can do to protect aspen art is to document it,” says Blalack. “Take as many pictures as possible.”
