Herders carved names, slogans, nude silhouettes and more into the trees around them during lonely seasons in the mountains. Now, researchers rush to find and record the arborglyphs before they disappear.

Throughout the mountains of the American West, carvings hidden on the trunks of aspen trees tell the stories of the sheepherders who made them as they passed through with their flocks. Most of the men who etched these arborglyphs into the living trees were Basques who, starting with the Gold Rush of the 1840s, had immigrated from the Basque Country that straddles the Pyrenees Mountains.