Just a few weeks ago, while I was working at the Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park, I chatted with an elderly man who told me that the urn under his arm contained his wife’s ashes. He’d just released a few of them along the rim of this deep and dramatic canyon in western Colorado.
Families and friends have released the ashes of someone they loved into beautiful places for a long time. We know this at Black Canyon because there is a visitor register over by the front door of the South Rim Visitor Center. Visitors regularly sign in, logging their trip by date, where they are from, and sometimes they tell us a lot more. We rangers actually do read the comments that visitors share with us, so I’ve begun to notice when someone writes that they’ve set free the ashes of a loved one into the air over the cliffs of the canyon.
The first time I saw such words was one winter’s day almost 10 years ago. The writer was a woman traveling from her home in Florida to California, and she said that she’d “released a few of my son’s ashes here.” At the time, her remarks caught me up short.
Now, it’s clear that releasing a loved one’s ashes in a beautiful place is no longer unusual. Once people visit national parks, national forests and other wild lands, these places become imbued over time with rich memories in beautiful settings. Solace, hope and optimism all spring from experiences such as waking up to a still and clear morning during a hunting trip, watching a flash flood roaring through the canyon country, or spotting a herd of elk in a meadow filled with ferns. It isn’t surprising that these are the places where some of us want – in a sense – to stay forever.
Practices vary from place to place, but people may be surprised to learn that scattering a handful of ashes is not necessarily prohibited on public lands. Some heavily visited parks and monuments may bar this activity, and some Native Americans have protested when remains are left in parks dedicated to their ancient people. A permit might also be expected for a memorial service. And because many agencies and organizations have restrictions against placing permanent monuments on the land, a growing alternative is to make a donation in someone’s memory for a trail, bench or other feature that would benefit coming generations.
As the West fills up with people, many of the special and meaningful places that people hold close to their hearts are being whittled away or squeezed out altogether. Who would have thought, 100 years ago, that the wilderness would receive the kind of reverence from us that it does today? Our challenge is to keep these open spaces open for generations still to come.
I came to know a minister from England while he was on sabbatical in the United States, who said he was captivated by the beauty of Colorado’s publicly owned lands. He said that these grand Western landscapes of the mountains, the canyons and open plains, had become meaningful to him because these are the places where heaven and earth meet. To a growing number of people, wilderness represents an eternity that can be seen with one’s own eyes.
I don’t know where else the older man went with his wife’s ashes, contained in the cobalt blue urn with her picture on the side. I don’t know if he released more of them along a river or into the wind, blowing over a mountaintop, but I know they will endure in the freedom of our Western lands.
Paul Zaenger has been a ranger at Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park since 1993, and is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org) in Paonia.
