Written in the Trees

San Cristobal Creek trickles from the snowbanks and springs of Lobo Peak in the Columbine-Hondo Wilderness northeast of Taos. Nestled into the forest, which is one of the largest roadless areas in the Southern Rockies, the creek harbors one of the few remaining populations of Río Grande cutthroat trout. The creek’s canyon is also home to thousands of arborglyphs: pictures or text that are cut into the bark of living trees.

Just up from the eye tree, “Cristo Es Juez y Tu Paga” sprawled down the trunk of an aspen, or “Christ Is Judge and You Pay.” Another curse adorned a second, several yards away. And another. Up and down that section of the creek, curses rang out. “Somebody was having a bad day,” Rasa said.

As the story goes, sometime in the 1940s or ’50s, a local rancher ran afoul of the U.S. Forest Service, most likely for overgrazing his allotment. The feds confiscated his cattle. Distraught, the rancher hit the bottle. Then, armed with several more bottles, he stumbled into the forest to bemoan his lost cows, curse the rangers, and, over the course of many days, mark his mournful trail with magnificent maledictions: “Dios Te Vomita,” or “God Vomits on You.”

“So is that the evil eye?” I asked. Rasa nodded.

SHAKESPEARE WAS HARDLY THE FIRST TO document the human tendency to emblazon the forest with names, dreams, hopes, and fears. The Roman poet Virgil, writing in 37 bc, mentions the shepherd Mopsus, who carved poems into the bark of the green beech. wToday, the Rocky Mountain West contains millions of arborglyphs, and New Mexico is home to hundreds of thousands of these unique carvings. They are a part of our cultural heritage, revealing stories of people at work on the land in the not-too-distant past.

Aspens provide an ideal surface for carvings, according to Carrie Leven. The retired Carson National Forest archaeologist has spent years documenting arborglyphs in north-central New Mexico. Unlike ponderosas or spruce, the soft, clear aspen bark is easy to work. It also renders a fleeting tableau, since aspens survive around 120 years. The majority die after just 80 to 100 years.

Folklorist James B. DeKorne documented hundreds of arborglyphs in the 1960s. By the time his book Aspen Art in the New Mexico Highlands was published in 1970, half of what he had photographed was already gone, he claimed. Still, the book remains a treasure of New Mexico’s nearly lost history written on trees. More recently, archaeologist Troy Lovata, professor at the University of New Mexico’s Honors College, and photographer and filmmaker Adam Herrera have documented New Mexico’s arborglyphs in photos, videos, and sketches. Other researchers utilize photogrammetry to document the glyphs, creating a 3D model in realistic detail. To date, most of this research has ended up in scholarly and scientific publications, Forest Service reports, or as part of historical documentation efforts such as Following the Manito Trail. As a result, the general public remains largely unaware of this historical treasure.

“We record the arborglyphs as we do other projects,” says Carson National Forest archaeologist Erin Brown. “You know, as we come across them while doing something else. We really don’t have a comprehensive plan to proactively document them forest-wide right now.”

Some have attempted to make plaster casts of glyphs or to peel them off and preserve them in a museum setting. The attempt at physical preservation may belie the ephemeral purpose of the glyphs themselves.

Unlike the petroglyphs that proliferate on rocks, boulders, and stones across the state, arborglyphs do not endure. Archaeologists and folklorists estimate that over 80 percent of the arborglyphs that covered western forests in the 1960s are gone, eaten up by fire, decay, natural forest succession, and the relentless passage of time.

Like all living beings, trees have an expiration date. So researchers are working to document and interpret what remains of these arborglyphs, scratching at what they tell us of the history of New Mexico and its people. “They’re just not well recorded,” says Leven. “There has been progress, but before too long, they’ll be gone.”

IT IS HARD TO MOUNT A TRAIL IN NORTHERN NEW MEXICO without stumbling across arborglyphs, which are also known as dendroglyphs or “culturally modified trees.” They are literally everywhere. The oldest date to the late 1600s, when Jicarilla Apaches carved rings on ponderosas to get at the cambium, or “sweet bark,” to eat in times of need. I have also seen cloud and lightning motifs common in Puebloan art throughout El Norte, but it is unclear when these symbols were carved or who carved them. Dating arborglyphs that do not have specific days, months, or years attached to them is nearly impossible. But researchers can arrive at an approximate period based on the age of the tree, the carving, and how much healing has taken place on the aspen.

We are also able to discern some clear purposes from these glyphs. Early European-American trappers left direction markers on trees that sat along frequently used transcontinental trails. Some arrows indicated where water could be found, a route that was too dangerous to travel, or where wagons should or should not go. Later, miners marked claim boundaries with giant X’s, initials, and sometimes a year. Still later, loggers carved into the aspens to mark turns for trucks.

Verbal way-finding directions abound. “It’s not far now,” “Just over the hill,” and “Turn around” are common. There are poems, prayers, wildlife and pets, Christian-style fish, curses, and crosses. Sometimes, a glyph can be self-reflective: “Well, how do you like the year 1941?” one near the Colorado border reads. Some are notes to friends or relatives. Out in the Brazos Mountains west of Taos, I came across a dog’s face and the stylized request, “Emilio, wait for me here.”

Like old Mopsus, shepherds were among the most prolific arborglyph creators and perhaps the most interesting. “These guys had time on their hands,” Leven explains. “What’s more interesting than the glyphs themselves is the story behind them.”

West of the village of Tres Piedras, in Río Arriba County, lie meadows rich in grass and wildflowers. Between 1880 and 1920, these valleys were filled with sheep. In 1900, Río Arriba County hosted four and a half million sheep. Taos County held millions more, and so on across the region. While the walking woolly mutton was king, thousands of New Mexicans were employed as herders.

Antonio may have been one of these shepherds. The man’s name is scrawled in cursive across multiple aspens at the rim of a sloping meadow, a natural place for grazing. Nearby, there is a glyph of a man in a hat, a pipe in his mouth. A dog is carved on another tree, and a glyph of a naked woman appears on yet another.

Another shepherd, Joe R. Martinez, developed his own sort of brand name and simple but elegant style of glyphs that he carved in the 1940s and ’50s. His subjects include cowboys, women in fancy hats, nudes, houses, and a witch. He signed his name and dated his work, leaving a trail for researchers to follow his ghost across the landscape, from the Chama area into Colorado and back again over several years.

Most of the shepherding artists clearly took both the tree and the landscape into account when planning their carvings. They often used a trunk’s curve to accentuate words, phrases, or a physical feature, such as the tail of a mountain lion, the eyes of an owl, or the bill of a duck.

In the ubiquitous glyphs of naked women (some more explicit than others), natural knots and bumps became breasts, nipples, or eyes. On one particularly creative glyph just across the border in southern Colorado, someone carved the front of a woman on one side of the tree and her backside on the other. Researchers assume the artist to have been a New Mexico shepherd, based on the location of the glyphs.

Some symbols are located directly on the trail, meant to be seen. Others face away, hidden from the view of most, indicating they weren’t meant to be seen by everyone and were, perhaps, messages for someone in particular.

The arborglyphs have a way of piling time upon itself to tell a larger story. The arc of the sheep industry, for instance, reflects the flow of immigration to New Mexico, often mirroring the vicissitudes of international politics and conflict. Researchers can frequently tell which cultural group made a particular glyph by what and how they chose to send their message.

For a time, Irish and Scottish immigrants escaping English oppression tended the flocks. Then New Mexicans in need of work took over, and after, Basque immigrants followed the gold rush in the 1860s. Still more Basques arrived nearly a century later, on the run from Spanish dictator Francisco Franco’s persecutions. Peruvians also came to the Land of Enchantment. Cubans, too, arrived in New Mexico in the 1960s; some took shepherding jobs and left carvings of names and political opinions that date from the 1960s well into the ’80s. However, by 1950, the sheep industry had largely collapsed, and cattle took the livestock throne. While some shepherds still hang on, they have mostly disappeared, leaving a place-based history written on trees.

“NO TE OLVIDES, AMIGOS.”

I won’t forget you, my friends.

Up along Highway 70, in the Sierra Madre mountains of Wyoming, there is a stand of aspens carved with the words “Taos” and “Arroyo Seco.”

Wyoming, like New Mexico, is rich in arborglyphs, many of them carved by New Mexicans. At the University of New Mexico, Lovata has spent years studying these trees, aiming to reconstruct a piece of New Mexico’s cultural history by filling gaps in the historical record.

In the first half of the 20th century, New Mexico’s persistent economic challenges drove thousands of mostly Hispanic residents to leave the state in search of better opportunities. Their migration for work is known as the Manito Trail, manito being a Spanish term of kinship and endearment rooted in the word hermano, or brother.

Thousands left to work in the sugar-beet fields of Colorado—my wife’s family among them—or in the mines of Arizona and Utah. Still others, mostly young men, traveled farther north to work as herders in Wyoming and Montana.

The oldest of the Wyoming arborglyphs reach back to about 1890, telling a larger story of both place and displacement. Many of these are expressions of grief, loneliness, and a deep longing for home and the call of the valleys and peaks of northern New Mexico.

Familiar New Mexico names are everywhere, “Chacon” and “Rael” being the most frequent. Dates mark when a person passed through a particular place: “July 6, 1905.” Images of cow skulls, sheepdogs, guitars, and love poems proliferate. What you do not see, observes Lovata, are images of sheep. Why no sheep? We really do not know, but probably because sheep were so common as to be almost not worth mentioning—somewhat like grass, Lovata theorizes in a 2016 scholarly article titled Marked Trees: Exploring the Context of Southern Rocky Mountain Arborglyphs.

According to Trisha Martinez, professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico, the New Mexico diaspora is considered among the assemblage of “true diasporas,” or mass movements of people who retain a collective memory of their homeland and a commitment to the continuation of their culture and heritage. “The link between the Manitos traveling to work and their villages in northern New Mexico was strong,” she says, noting how the Wyoming arborglyphs were a manifestation of this linkage. “[The arborglyphs] helped them to maintain a sense of cultural value and ethnic identity.”

LET US BE HONEST ABOUT ARBORGLYPHS.

They are graffiti. Today, carving on trees is considered vandalism, illegal in our national forests and parks. The $500 fine and possible jail time is not worth having your name on a tree. At least not for me.

Perhaps more important is the damage arborglyphs can cause a forest ecosystem. A tree’s bark is like human skin, protecting it from fungus, pests, and bacteria. Just as a person can get a dangerous infection from a cut, so can the tree. Carvings also disrupt the tree’s vascular system, harming its overall health and rendering it even more susceptible to infection.

In 2017, in the Canjilon Ranger District of the Carson National Forest, west of Taos, managers were forced to cut down an entire forest after a severe fungal infection killed thousands of trees. The culprit? Decades of arborglyph carvings had weakened the trees to such an extent that a fungal outbreak, Cytospora, took hold of the entire forest. “It wasn’t so much the older carvings causing the problem. It was the newer ones,” says Carson archaeologist Brown. “The shepherds and ranchers 100 years ago made their carvings shallow in the bark. They healed. More recent glyphs cut deep into the bark, permanently damaging the tree.”

Prior to the salvage operation, the Forest Service did a detailed survey of the Canjilon glyphs, recording thousands of carvings, according to Brown. “Most of them were names and dates associated with local people. But some were pure art—a lady’s face done in incredible detail, horses, and one that stood out: a house with a tree-lined pathway.”

The weakened trees were also susceptible to the western tent caterpillar and the western spruce budworm that defoliated the aspens. By 2017, nearly 80 percent of the trees in the area were dead. The Forest Service embarked on a massive clear cutting and removal operation to save what remained. “We see a new aspen forest already starting to grow back,” Brown says.

The term graffiti, of course, carries heavy negative connotations of vandalism. But fundamentally, it is about marking one’s place. The arborglyphs trumpet the idea of I was here and possibly I matter. Without the arborglyphs in Wyoming, for example, what historical record would there be of New Mexicans so far from home and the emotional toll associated with those migrations? This graffiti holds a historical message that is not part of the dominant cultural narrative. Arborglyphs give meaning to a person’s place in the world.

New Mexico’s arborglyphs can leave a person with a feeling of melancholy. For all the fascinating and, at times, amusing stories they tell, the sense of loneliness, displacement, and the pleading for human connection and understanding haunts these high-altitude aspen groves. Up San Cristobal Creek, Rasa felt bad for the angry rancher who had carved his curses into so many trees. I did not. I took the side of the Forest Service, explaining that the man had probably overgrazed and harmed his allotment, thereby depleting a collective natural resource.

“Maybe so,” she said. “But I’m not sure that’s the point. He was angry and hurt and he wanted to be heard. Isn’t that what all these carvings are about? A human need to be heard?”

Read more: Two years after the largest wildfire in New Mexico history, landscapes and residents are forever changed. As the metamorphosis continues, many are working hard to preserve and regrow the forests for future generations.