Carvings are found in aspen stands throughout the Tahoe National Forest. Photo © Robert Destefano
Kristina Crawford and Michael Baldrica, archaeologists for the Tahoe National Forest in California, wander through an aspen grove littered with dead and dying trees. Leaves shimmer and quake in a north wind, which has been fanning a fire that authorities are struggling to contain in the Truckee River Canyon.
“Here she is,” Crawford says. She smooths her hands along a dying aspen. Carved in the bark is an image of a nude woman—Trini, according to the writing below her feet.
The armless figure, two feet tall, is a prime example of the disappearing artwork of Basque shepherds, which Crawford and Baldrica are working to document before the trees die and the carvings disappear forever. Primitive figures like Trini—along with other images and messages—appear on aspens from California to Nevada. The archaeologists’ research is revealing the lifestyles of these lonely herders—and also reflecting a century of changes in the management of western forests.
“Without fire, many of our aspen stands are becoming choked by shade-tolerant species, but that’s good for the carvings,” Crawford says. A fire in the stand would destroy many of the pastoral poems and artistic figures the shepherds carved into the trees.
The oldest carvings were made in the 1880s with penknives or leather awls. In the process of healing, the tree would form scars that were black against the white bark, protruding and precise.
“These men would spend months alone with their sheep in the mountains. The work was easy and time was what they had most of, so they carved. They would pass messages along through the trees,” Crawford says.
Today, archaeologists are using the messages to glimpse the daily lives of the shepherds. The carvings express a range of emotions, from the desire for female companionship to observations that capture the rigors of isolation. Poems, details of Reno’s brothels and admissions of love for the boss’s wife dot the trees in laconic messages.
Though herding did not bring the Basques to the Sierras, it gave them a reason to stay. In 1849, an economic depression across the Iberian Peninsula and the discovery of gold in California triggered the Basque migration to the American West. These young, typically poor, immigrants found jobs as herders in the burgeoning sheep industry, which was feeding the men working in the gold mines. By the early twentieth century, grazing companies had recognized that the Basques were particularly adept at handling the isolation that accompanies herding. But the carvings offer a different perspective.
“Many of the carvings are intensely personal. These men were lonely and never thought that someday, nearly a hundred years later, an archaeologist would be poking through their most private thoughts,” Crawford says.
Though the Basque presence has remained strong in the area, in part because of programs like the University of Nevada’s Center for Basque Studies, few continue to work as herders. The clouds of dust seen rising from the Tahoe National Forest tend to come from herds watched by newer immigrants: Peruvians, Mexicans or Bolivians. The Basques have either returned to their homeland, which has a much improved economy, or have found work in U.S. cities. Herders from other cultures have adopted the practice of carving into the aspens, just not as skillfully.
“They tend to dig a bit deeper, which scars the trees differently than the light etchings of the Basques,” Baldrica says. He estimates that in thirty years, the last of the Basque-carved trees will die, but according to aspen ecologists, the mark their sheep left on the landscape will remain.
The age of current aspen stands on the Tahoe corresponds with the end of an era of intensive grazing, the late 1800s, and the beginning of fire suppression, around 1905, says Dale Bartos, an aspen ecologist for the U.S. Forest Service. Aspens are a disturbance-dependent species, meaning they rely on natural disturbances like fire and wind to regenerate. For centuries, their understory—grass, light vegetation and even aspen saplings—provided continuous fuel for low-intensity fires that helped maintain their populations. But the livestock the shepherds tended preferred these fine fuels, and when grazing depleted the fuel beds, fires burned less frequently, discouraging aspen generation and allowing conifers to gain a foothold.
“The number of stands was dropping when the Forest Service began suppressing fire. After suppression, the decline quickened,” Bartos says.
The trees bearing the carvings may be at risk from another assault. In the past five years, mature aspen stands have been dying off at alarming rates in Colorado, Utah and southern Wyoming. The Forest Service calls the phenomenon Sudden Aspen Decline, but hasn’t yet pinpointed its origins. Researchers theorize that a drought several years back weakened the stands and made them susceptible to disease and insect infestation. Because of decades of fire suppression, many of the stands are more than seventy years old, and tend to be more vulnerable than young trees to insects and other stresses. Aspen groves are connected by a single root system, and Sudden Aspen Decline is problematic, researchers say, because it can kill a grove’s root system and prevent regeneration.
Both the Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management are addressing declining aspen numbers, using a combination of prescribed fires and mechanical thinning in the affected states to help restore the health of the remaining groves.
“There are considerable efforts under way throughout the Forest Service and the BLM to restore aspen. Most are very successful. Some aren’t, because of animal pressure—both wild and domestic—and the lack of fire,” Bartos says.
In the Tahoe stands, the carvings are protected from thinning and burning projects because they are considered a cultural and historic resource. According to Baldrica, the agency won’t be creating disturbances in the stands until the carved trees die.
“They’re all going to be gone in the next few decades, but we can’t go out there and kill them with prescribed burns or thinning,” Baldrica says.Behind him, billowing over the crest of the Verdi range, a column of smoke was boiling out of the river canyon.
“Without fire suppression, the aspen groves may well be healthier, but the story of the Basque shepherds would be incomplete,” Baldrica says.
No doubt, somewhere within the perimeter of the fire, burning aspens triggered the regenerative process. It’s likely a few of those trees had been carved. Baldrica just hopes they had already been documented.