I finally found it! Well my friend did, anyway for the last year I have been doing research on cairns and stumbled across this story "rumor" of a cairn wrench. Used by early Trail Blazer Cairn Rescue in and around the San Jacinto Wilderness areas. The story goes that an old mountain man made it to help the workers secure bricks in the construction of road side gutters. Cairns back in the 30s and 40s were quite common and made it easy to avoid getting lost by everyone who entered the forest areas. Cairns typically would remain in place for years at time and would rarely topple. Back then, nobody would even consider them as anything other than a bread crumb to mark a safe return. Nobody would think harming them. A cairn, was a
respected part of the outdoors. Special care was taken to avoid them completely, you just knew someones life depended on it. If you knocked one over, well you just put it back, period! This went on for years until the early 80s when cairns started to vanish at an alarming rate. Many hikers got lost and couldn't find their way. The hiking community was in an uproar. Why was this happening, Who would do such a thing? Repeated attempts to replace these markers were foiled again and again. Nobody knew what to do. Sightings/stories similar to Big Foot were reported but were quickly discounted. The rate of lost hikers rose. Nearly all hope was lost until one day the old mountain man came to the rescue! It didn't take long! He showed how just a few twists of the magic wrench could make any cairn unmovable. You can see him in the picture below. This old mountain man volunteered his time and followed the trail blazers back into the wilderness, used this wrench to tighten all the cairns down. It took only a few days (back then, old guys could cover 200 miles a day in 5 hours) and they were all back in place. He became the man of the year. Order was restored and all went as it used to, well for a few months until this old mountain man said someone entered his private property and swiped his wrench in the middle of the night. He had "NO TRESPASSING" signs posted all over his property boundary. That didn't seem to matter to this guy. The Old Mountain Man awoke in the middle of the night only to see the outline of some scrawny kid with light colored hair running away in the night, with the wrench. Sure enough by the time the sun had come up all the cairns were demolished.
The story concludes with a group of boy scouts sighting of a kid throwing the wrench from the top of San Jacinto peak toward Mt. San Antonio. He miss to the right and it hit somewhere around Mt. Harwood. The kid again ran away and ever since that day all cairns are being kicked down on a regular basis. Rumor is that this kid grew up and is still active in this cairn kicking frenzy.
Well nobody ever found that wrench, untill yesterday. Yep! we got it.
And just to make sure we tested it on a few we found along the way. Sure enough it works! Just a few twists on each pebble and it's like super glue!
We even tried kicking em. Almost broke my toe!
Well Mr. Cairn Kicker dude. where ever and who ever you are. Guess what! It's back!!! and your cairn kicking days are numbered.
Here's a few we secured along our way down from Baldy yesterday!
I must have toppled a few dozen on Whitney alone last year. More often than not, they're just remnants of someone passing time while sitting on the side of a trail and not really needed. To me it's the same as neon flagging tape or a tree blaze...should be used sparingly.
