How about an Interesting as HECK thread???

[FlyingClayDisk]

OOOOO!!!  Me next!  Me next!!!

This has volcanos, boiling snow, and mystery!

https://www.lakescientist.com/mystery-of...ns-solved/

Your link reminded me of something else which is pretty interesting.  In the link there is a picture of a "cairn" overlooking the Crowley Lake area.  "Cairns" (a human made pile of rocks) have a pretty interesting history.  Cairns have been used for a variety of reasons by different cultures over the course of human history.  They are most often used to mark something or other, but some of them are used to tell a story.

I grew up in the great state of Wyoming, and in the very remote areas of the state it is not uncommon to find cairns.  I wondered for the longest time what they were, what they meant, and who put them there(?).  When I was in college I worked for an Engineering company who did registered land surveys.  One summer the survey crew I worked on was involved in a contract to run a survey across the entire state from north to south for a pipeline (Northern Natural Gas's "Trailblazer" pipeline).  Our Crew Chief was an Old West and Wyoming history nut.

During my time on this crew we surveyed across some of the remotest areas imaginable (less people meant less right of way problems, so it was the remotest of the remote).  I learned the cairns I saw served two main purposes in Wyoming.  One of these purposes was to mark geographical survey points (land divisions) from the original U.S. surveys which laid out the American "Frontier" (more on this in a moment).  The other purpose for cairns was they served as both a marker and a 'language' of sorts for the Basque sheepherders who still roamed the vast BLM lands of the West.  The cairns would mark things such as good grazing spots, or mark where fresh water was nearby and various other things.  But more than just marking a geographical feature, the cairns also served as a language.  The piles of rocks would be adjusted certain ways by different herders as they passed through the area over the years and decades.  They told a story about the conditions, and about the herders themselves.  They served as both a greeting and sometimes even a warning.  Each passing herder would change the cairn just slightly, and they would also add to it (to continue the story).  Many of them became taller than a man.

A cairn, once established, can remain intact for virtually centuries, and in some cases it would have been decades before another sheepherder came upon one of the cairns left by one of their brethren.  The life of a sheepherder is one of the loneliest occupations a person can ever do.  Their 'contracts' often lasted for 3 to 5 years, and in that time they may never see another person.  It is a life of solitude few can even imagine.  The wind and the elements in Wyoming can be harsh in the extremes, but these simple piles of rocks, or cairns, weathered all of these extremes.  They last forever.  

We surveyed hundreds of miles across vast expanses of the Wyoming lanscape, and I always looked forward to finding the cairns.  It was interesting to look around across the landscape and wonder what life was like when many of these were first established.

Regarding surveying, the cairns also served a purpose.  These were not erected by sheep herders, but rather by the original surveyors who first surveyed the western United States.  Because of the nature of how a survey is performed, a registered land survey has to "tie" the points it lays out to known territorial boundaries (often called Monuments), and then document the distances and angles to these known points.  Every so often we would need to find the next boundary marker along our route.  We could compute the expected location and angle based on our triangulated position.  Then, when we got close, we would start looking for the actual marker.  Now remember, this was in the middle of literally "nowhere" ("bum-fuck-Egypt", some might say).  These original surveys were performed using a wagon wheel for measurement (among other tools), thus to surveyors these surveys were called the "Wagon Wheel Survey's of the 1870's". In the high deserts of Wyoming cairns were used for these boundary markers.  They were the only things which would stand the tests of time.

I can't even begin to count how many of these boundary markers we computed the location of, only to find them down to the EXACT INCH of where we predicted them to be located!  Seriously, down...to...the...inch!  One hundred years before we were there, someone had come before us, probably the only other humans to have set foot in that exact spot, and they nailed the location down to the exact inch.  While we may have been 150 to 200 miles from the nearest town or road in the late 1970's, but back in 1873 the people who piled those rock cairns were probably 1,500 miles from the nearest civilization and even so they still maintained a degree of accuracy which is fantastical in the extreme of extremes.  Can you imagine such a thing today?  People would just say..."Awww fuck it, just pile the rocks here...no one will ever know (or care) if it's right or wrong!"

Honestly, I bet you never thought something as simple as a pile of rocks could be interesting!

Cairns...pretty interesting.