A weighty and sentimental piece of Tucson-area history has vanished from Saguaro National Park.
A massive rock cairn at Rincon Peak, erected by a surveyor in 1903 to help map the lands that became Southern Arizona, was “inexplicably dismantled” by a person or persons sometime within the past year, park officials said Tuesday on the agency’s Facebook page.
Photographs posted on the park’s page show the rocks from the large cairn strewn about the ground.
Whoever is behind the destruction was physically fit enough for a two-day climb and still had “energy left to dismantle a rock pile that was 8-feet by 12-feet,” the agency said.
Anyone who has hiked the area, in the Rincon Mountains southeast of Tucson, within the past year is asked to contact park officials. The local office can be reached by phone at 733-5153 or online at nps.gov/sagu/contacts.htm
“We are just looking for information to help us narrow down what might have happened,” officials said.
In a Facebook post, National Park Service retiree John D. Williams said the site was “more than just a rock cairn.”
It was a place people came to grieve their lost loves, often leaving jewelry or valuables behind, he said.
“What most people never knew is that wedged into the rocks were such objects as medals won in wartime, Matchbox cars that belonged to children taken before their time and wedding rings from failed relationships,” Williams wrote.
Park officials said rock cairns are common in Southern Arizona, typically used to represent points of significance where it isn’t possible to dig down and set a post in the ground.
