What Are These Stacks Of Rocks Across Wyoming

If you've driven across Wyoming, you've seen these things. You can spot them from your car at high points. A round stack of rocks. So what are they?

Those are called Rock Cairns.

A round stack of rocks used for navigation, boundary marking, or surveying in Wyoming is called a cairn or occasionally a sheepherder monument. Early federal surveyors, homesteaders, and herders stacked these stones to mark section corners, claim boundaries, or line-of-sight pathways across the state's rugged terrain.

Wyoming Sheepherder Monuments are unmortared stone cairns built on remote ridgelines by lonely herders in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Ranging from simple stacks to fantastic, face-carved totems, they served as navigational markers, supply drop locations, and creative outlets across the state's expansive sheep-grazing country.

These historic rock piles are scattered on private ranches and public Bureau of Land. You can find them while hiking, but if you are driving in prairie areas, look at the tops of high points like buttes, and you'll see one now and then.

Sweetwater County: Features designated Sheepherder's Monument sites where herders built fantastic stone figures during the height of the region's wool-growing boom.

Campbell County: Several massive stone monuments, some predating local homesteading, still stand on heritage ranches near Gillette.

Carbon County: Frequent stone cairns dot the landscape near Elk Mountain and the historic sheep wagon routes.

If you come across any during a hike please do not disturbe them. These are just stacks of rock and are important to the state's history.