My second youngest study site at Glacier Bay is on a bench of outwash about 150 feet above Muir Inlet. Before alders covered the young surface in the mid 20th century, the bench offered a good view of the retreating face of Muir Glacier to the north. William O. Field established a photo station there maybe in the late 1940s and marked the spot with a cairn assembled of several large rocks. I found the cairn in 1988 when I set up my study plots in a dense thicket of alders.
![](http://fastie.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Fred1995-3779-1024x698.jpg)
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![](http://fastie.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Fred1995-3781-1024x698.jpg)
I was impressed with the size of the boulders Field used to make his cairn. It seemed like a superhuman amount of work to move them and then lift them into a pile. But then I was schooled in how it was done. In 1990 when I was establishing the permanent plots at my youngest study site farther up Muir Inlet, I measured the compass bearing and distance from some of the plots to a big boulder. I was working with Dan Uliassi and I think it was his idea to turn that boulder into a cairn. Dan might have been inspired by the effort William O. Field’s cairn demanded–he was definitely highly motivated and did all of the work building his cairn. I learned my lesson and took photos.
![](http://fastie.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/GB_UpMu_20180906-3745-1024x696.jpg)
Last month Galen and I found Dan’s cairn while we were relocating the study plots at that site. My maps and notes described it as a “boulder” and I didn’t immediately remember that Dan had made it more than that. So I was surprised to find a huge cairn and then slowly recalled that there was a photo of Dan and the cairn. When I got home I searched through some 28-year-old color slides and found the whole series of photos of Dan’s project.
![](http://fastie.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/GBUpMu_20180906-3717-1024x691.jpg)
![](http://fastie.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/GB_UpMu_20180906-3739-1024x699.jpg)
![](http://fastie.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/GBUpMu_20180906-3729-1024x695.jpg)
![](http://fastie.net/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/UpperMuir_20180825-3403c-701x1024.jpg)
The vegetation has changed some since 1990, and it was really helpful to have the cairn to guide us to some of the plots. We might have never recognized a single boulder. During this expedition the plot locations were documented with GPS, so like William O. Field’s cairn, Dan’s has mostly historical value now.
Little bitty boulders.