Human history is difficult to preserve in the fjords. Most of the buildings constructed in the past were made of wood, and the stones of the foundations were often repurposed in new buildings once the main structure had fallen into disuse, disrepair, or been lost to fire or other disasters. There are few monuments to be found, and most remnants are scattered and overgrown, while some surviving relics stay put far longer than can be expected. Sometimes, moreover, you find examples of people leaning into the transitory nature of our efforts and make their marks in the landscape in the face of an overwhelming likelihood that what they build will be torn down within the year. This blogpost features one such example, namely a small cairn placed in a rather unlikely place.
In my native village, Hyen, in the Western Norwegian fjords, we often find cairns in the mountains. These are long-surviving markers to guide shepherds or other travellers, and sometimes they are of more recent make, being erected for mountaineers and serving as a gathering point or a point of orientation. Some cairns, however, are made with a seeming desire to make a mark in the landscape, even in places where the landscape is too mutable to support any such long-term history.
This summer, I found one such precariously positioned cairn in a scree in a promontory on the western side of the fjord of my village. The promontory is called "Bjønnasvøra" in the local dialect, which translates to "Bear gorge". The name is a testament to the bears that once roamed the mountainsides of the village before they were hunted into local extinciton about a century ago. Bjønnasvøra is one of the most mutable locations in the village, because the gorge that empties onto the promontory usually brings huge avalanches of snow into the landscape below. With the changing of the climate and the less snowy winters, the gorge often brings rockslides rather than avalanches due to flash floods. Every year, the first landing on this promontory is followed by a quick survey to see what has changed since last year. One of the most dramatic changes came in 2024, when rockslides caused the blocking of one of the two riverbeds on the promontory, meaning that the water pouring from the gorge was now redirected to the farther bay only. This situation was, in turn, altered sometime this year, when new rockslides enabled the hither riverbed to flow again.
It was in the ever-changing scree created by millennia of avalanches and rockslides that I came upon the aforementioned cairn. It was placed on a boulder which in turn was mostly drowned in smaller rocks, and consisted only of four large rocks stacked on top of one another. I do not know who erected it, but if they were locals they would be aware that the monument was bound to fall with the next major rockslide or avalanche. Yet I do understand the impulse of erecting such transitory monuments, and I have done similar things myself from time to time. Because such markers as this are made for one's own pleasure, practically in the face of the forces of change, just out of the curiosity to see whether it can survive, and with the ambition of making a mark on the landscape. This kind of structure, however, is a form of that ambition which has been channelled into a healthy impulse that does not destroy the landscape in the process, and which symbolises the inexorably transitory nature of history and human endeavour in the fjords.
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