Before Tucson Rock Cairn Fell, A Ranger Saw Its Hidden Treasures

TUCSON, AZ — No one knows who, or what, knocked over a 117-year-old cairn at the remote peak of Rincon Mountain. But it is what once lay concealed in the rocks that concerns retired U.S. Forest Service Ranger John Williams: He claims that the cairn contained dozens of mementos, including military medals and handwritten notes left behind by generations of pilgrims ascending the overlook of the Tucson Valley.

Williams recalls a day in 1998 that began with a "routine patrol" to the top of Rincon Mountain. By the time the sun set that night, he tells Patch, the day had taken an extraordinary turn.

The hike takes around eight hours on foot, covering 16 miles and ascending 4,000 feet; the final half-mile to the peak is so steep that you can reach out and touch the trail as it rises before you. Only the hardiest hikers brave the climb.

"This solitary trail up to the top of Rincon peak is not something that's done by a lot of people," Williams says. And though he calls the journey "a kind of a brutal trail," he adds the reward at the top is a panoramic view, "probably the best view of the Tucson Valley. You can see forever."

For more than a century, a massive, 14-foot-tall rock cairn also occupied the peak.

But no longer.

That's because earlier this month, Saguaro National Park released a photo of the cairn toppled at Rincon peak, its flat granite stones scattered across the surface. The photo (and accounts from hikers) confirmed rumors that the remote, historically important cairn — which had been assembled in 1903 at the behest of government mapmakers — had been "inexplicably dismantled."

Williams says he saw the photo of the dismantled cairn as it appeared on his Facebook timeline. Even with a career spanning nearly four decades, the image of the scattered stones brought back memories of climbing to the top of the Rincon Mountain range more than 20 years ago. That was the day Williams says that he learned what was hidden inside the cairn.

In his account, the revelation began with the unmistakable sound, cutting through nature's stillness, of Don McLean.

"I heard music as I was getting to the top, which was odd," Williams recounts. "I come over the rise where you should see the large monument, the cairn, and there's a guy standing up there in shorts and tennis shoes and not much else, and he's moving to the music of 'American Pie.'"

Williams remembers being shocked at what he saw: The cairn was gone.

"He'd Got The Whole Damn Thing Disassembled"

As a law enforcement officer, Williams faced a dilemma: While the rock cairn had played a key role for mapmakers defining the wilderness of the pre-state Arizona Territory, no official sign existed to alert contemporary visitors. The cairn had never been designated as a protected or historic place in the park.

The man in shorts was not expecting company.

"He thought I was going to arrest him and take him down the mountain," Williams recalls. "He'd got the whole damn thing disassembled."

But it wasn't as simple as writing the man a ticket.

"There was the practical question: Is this an offense or not?" Williams says. "The other part was, I needed him — I wanted him — to rebuild the damn thing."

So, the ranger and the stranger got to talking. The man was from Tucson, Williams learned, explaining only that "he had done something pretty bad, gotten himself in real trouble and wanted to start somewhere fresh."

But before he left Tucson for good, the man had decided to leave his mark at the top of a mountain where he had hiked regularly in his youth. According to Williams, the man wanted to rebuild the historic cairn, which he believed "wasn't structurally sound."

So, one day prior to Williams' happenstance arrival, the man set out for the peak of the Rincon Mountain.

"He didn't have any backpack, he didn't have any food, just a boom box. He took two gallons of milk up there — I saw nothing else," Williams says. "He told me he intended to rebuild this thing in his image, that he'd always looked at it and thought it was unstable. He wanted to rebuild it in a way that would stand the test of time."

In addition to the milk and boom box, the man in shorts had brought along "a heavily laminated American flag," which the builder intended to plant at the top of the cairn. When Williams appeared that morning, the man had already worked through the night, transforming the monument — which had stood 12 feet high and 16 feet wide — into neat stacks of stones.

As Williams considered his options at the not-quite-a-crime scene, something caught his eye on a nearby rock. It was the glint of manufactured metal.

"He'd found these objects and placed them on a rock," Williams says. "There were some Purple Hearts there, a Bronze Star, little toys and notes."

Williams learned that, inside the cairn, the man had found what generations of travelers had left behind: military medals, Matchbox cars, wedding rings, faded photographs, the remains of notes — including one on which he could read the words "In memory of ... "

Williams remembers feeling stunned.

"I had no idea these things were in there,” he says.

After all, it wasn't uncommon for hikers to commemorate their difficult journey to Rincon Peak — years later, Williams adds, a ranger would discover "72 pairs of panties, just strewn all over the cairn" — but he'd never imagined the monument had contained a treasury of sentimental objects, their presence echoing long-lost memories beneath the stones.

"It was obvious," Williams says, "that people had gone up there to exorcize something from their soul."

"One Stone At A Time"

For the next two hours, the ranger remained at the mountain top.

"We started putting it back together," Williams says. "He promised me that he'd put it back together piece by piece, and I left him to the work. I considered citing him, considered doing a lot of things with him. I told him he could not place the flag up there."

In the end, Williams chose not to write the man a ticket.

As he turned around to make the return trek down the mountain, he looked back one last time at the deconstructed cairn and its treasure within. Months later, on another patrol, Williams would find the cairn standing at its previously imposing height.

"I think he was there for another eight hours," he says now. "It takes effort, a huge effort, to spend all that time up there."

But that effort paid off. Williams now believes that the rebuilding was necessary for the monument to survive into the 21st century. Unbeknownst to hikers, the cairn that’s welcomed them to the peak for the last two decades was not the same pile of rocks erected by government surveyors in 1903, but one assembled by a milk-chugging, boom box-hefting hiker who had followed his own fervor on a mission to build something that would outlast history.

When Williams saw the recent images of the cairn toppled — park officials believe it fell at some point last summer — he thought back to that day in 1998. He thought of the man in shorts, dancing to rock music alone on a mountain. He thought of the toy cars and prayers scrawled on old paper.

"I stayed with him enough to replace the objects," Williams thought to himself, "and now I wonder what happened to them."

To date, officials at Saguaro National Park have few available leads on the culprit responsible for the cairn's destruction.

Could the structure have collapsed under its own weight, destabilized by years of hikers adding their own stones? Or, perhaps a violent storm smashed the monument to society's expansion?

Maybe it was just people being people?

Indeed, cairns are often viewed as human-made nuisances on the natural landscape, and park officials are "always encouraging people to get rid of small cairns that people build all over the place to mark their own trails," Williams acknowledges.

In Williams’ view, it is more likely that a hiking club arrived at the top of the mountain and simply removed what they saw as an obstruction to the peak's natural beauty.

The retired ranger says he never again heard from the man he met on the peak. He doesn't know where he settled after fleeing Tucson — or if he knows that the rock cairn he rebuilt has been destroyed.

But Williams isn't convinced that this is the end for the cairn at the peak of Rincon Mountain.

Hikers continue to brave the steep trail, and Williams suggests that they aren't so different from the man who in 1998 sought to rebuild and strengthen the cairn, or even from the surveyors who stood on the mountaintop in 1903 as they mapped the territory that would one day become southern Arizona.

People tend to leave bits of themselves behind, Williams says. Maybe it's a military medal, a Matchbox car, or wedding ring. Maybe a carefully arranged pile of rocks.

The old cairn may be toppled, but Williams raises the possibility that its new incarnation is already growing.

"Maybe it's already being rebuilt," he wonders, "one stone at a time."

Read more: Cairn That Told 'Human Story' Of Pre-State Arizona Toppled: Why?