A Monumental Landscape

A Monumental Landscape. Hells Canyon National Recreation Area. Across Horse Creek from you is “Monument Ridge” named for its mysterious stone monuments that are visible with binoculars. It is not known exactly who made them or why. Perhaps they were built to mark grazing areas or piled up by a Basque sheepherder feeling small and lonely in this vast and rugged landscape. , , ”My father understood what it was to be ‘sheeped’ – to go insane from lonliness...He’d herded in the alpine...In his time, he’d endlessly carved family names and verses on trees and had built those curious sheperd monuments...‘stoneboys’...careful piles of stone, therapy sculpture to keep his hands and mind busy. There were Basque herder carvings and scribblings, many in verse, on water troughs, trees, tanks, rocks and fence posts all over the Western wildnerness...mostly sentimental home thoughts.” , , Quote from “A Shepherd Watches, a Shepherd Sings”, by Louis Irigaray and Theodore Taylor