The Conscience Pile

July 21, 2018 4:19 AM

"The fossilized remains of an ancient forest, dazzling with glints of opal and amethyst, have tempted many a visitor to Arizona’s Petrified Forest National Park. Some who pocketed a rock were later guilt-stricken into sending them back, and some even included letters of lamentation and curses. Bad Luck, Hot Rocks: Conscience Letters and Photographs from the Petrified Forest, published in November by the Ice Plant, is a photography and archive project by artists Ryan Thompson and Phil Orr to document these stolen fossils and their woeful apologies."

Triassic Park [podcast]

The Petrified Forest National Park in Arizona has the largest collection of petrified wood in the world. The beautiful wood is more than 200 million years old, and visitors to the park often take a little piece home with them as a souvenir. But stealing the wood has serious consequences, both legal and, some say, supernatural.

Slide Show: Rocks, Paper, Sinners [The New Yorker -- incognito mode recommended]

These are all the rocks that have been stolen and subsequently returned by light-fingered visitors who came to regret their crime. Park employees call it the conscience pile.

Hawaii's 'Cursed' Lava Rocks Are Driving National Park Staff Insane [Vice]

Over the last several decades, Pele's name has been corrupted by the tourism industry, according to National Park Service records obtained by Motherboard through a Freedom of Information Act request.

"There is NO 'Curse of the Rocks,'" a cultural interpreter for the National Park Service wrote in a document that was circulated internally. "Many believe that the idea of lava rocks being cursed gained traction in the 1940s or 1950s when tour guides grew tired of cleaning their vehicles of lava and/or black sand after tours to Kalapana."

(Previously)

posted by lesser weasel (7 comments total)

Interesting! While some of this is reported in a wry/ironic fashion, there are also undercurrents of deep sadness in some of these letters. Thanks for posting.
posted by carter at 5:35 AM on July 21, 2018

I work on a lot of projects that go through Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act and where artifacts sometimes turn up during excavation. Legalities aside, everyone talks about the bad luck of taking artifacts home as a straightforward given -- I'm not sure where the belief came from (i.e., if it was an organic development or a deliberate strategy to prevent theft), but it seems to be fairly effective at keeping people from pocketing stuff on the job site.

When I was a kid, most of my relatives had huge displays of arrowheads and suchlike that they had scavenged from public lands; I'm sure people are still out there taking artifacts but I haven't seen one of those home displays in a very long time.
posted by Dip Flash at 6:52 AM on July 21, 2018

Crystal Cove State Park in California has a few fantastic tide pools. People would constantly try to carry out buckets full of flora and fauna. I loved watching the "lifeguards" (state park rangers) go after these people, most of whom just couldn't fathom the harm they were causing.
posted by Brocktoon at 7:00 AM on July 21, 2018 [2 favorites]

Been there several times and there is a large display in the main museum of these items and the letters.

Not sure why anyone would take a stone from inside the park when there are private stores and logs and amazing stuff for sale all around that park (literally right outside the entrances).
posted by CrowGoat at 7:07 AM on July 21, 2018

I remember visiting Petrified Forest in the 80s and seeing the hit parade of sorrowful letters.
posted by lagomorphius at 8:35 AM on July 21, 2018 [1 favorite]

I just came back from Cape Alava in Olympic National Park. At low tide, while walking around Tskawahyah Island (the westernmost point of the contiguous 48 states), my son found a piece of dried bull kelp and made it into a horn (something like this, but completely dried out and suitable for keeping). I thought it would be nice to take home, especially as kelp is constantly washing ashore and decomposing. As we were walking back to our campsite, a ranger chatted with us for a bit and told us we had to leave the horn. Which we did.
posted by ShooBoo at 9:18 AM on July 21, 2018

While camping on National Park land in the southwest, I took a gold panning class that went over the basics and let us pan for gold out of a creek. Except if we found any, we had to throw it back -- not so much because it was National Park land, but because the government had already sold the mineral rights ages ago, and nobody had been able to unwind the paperwork enough to even establish who currently held those rights, let alone roll them back to prevent exploitation, or even let some kids keep any flecks of gold they might find.

Similarly, hiking in a forest in Maine in the Boy Scouts, we were prevented from having a campfire on a chunk of government land not because of fire issues or legal prohibitions, but because the legal rights to all the wood had already been sold to a lumber company, and nobody thought to allow an exemption for hikers or campers.

While I appreciate that the government Petrified Forest land is currently being kept safe-ish, I suspect that before too long some politician will decide there's corporate donations to be had in exchange for mineral rights extraction, and all that will be left are these returned fragments.
posted by Blackanvil at 9:40 PM on July 21, 2018 [2 favorites]