The 3-mile Cairns Trail opened June 30, two months to the day after a professional trail-building crew started building it. The trail gets its name from the many cairns, or rock piles, strewn along its length.

Stonewall Superintendent Sam England said no one knows exactly who made the cairns, when they were built or why someone took the trouble to put them there.

"Some think they're Native American in origin, and others think they might have been put there by early white settlers or by Civil War soldiers," England explained. "The official word from the state Historical Preservation Office is that their origin is 'undetermined.'"

 Soon after the park opened to the public in 1990, people exploring its 1,736 acres began finding stacks of stones located high on some of the hillsides.

"To date, we've found about 200 of them," England said. "They range from knee-high mounds the size of a coffee table to walls almost 300 feet long."

When England became superintendent in 1998, the park had no recreational trails.

"My wife and I would go out walking the hills, and we'd encounter these cairns," he recalled. "I thought we should do something to make them more accessible to our visitors, so I mapped out some ideas for a trail network."

Teams of AmeriCorps volunteers came in 2002 and 2003 to build the Hevener Orchard Trail, the park's first officially designated footpath. The trail passed by a couple of the enigmatic rock walls, but didn't go out of its way to feature them.

"The more cairns we found, the more I felt we should do more to highlight them. We drew up a plan for a trail that would connect the Hevener Orchard Trail with the Autumn Laurel Brook Trail -- one that would lead hikers to some of the most interesting cairn groupings."

An $83,000 recreational trails grant from the Federal Highway Administration allowed parks officials to have the trail professionally constructed. The contract went to Tri-State Co. of Lesage, W.Va., an outfit with extensive trail-building experience.

England said he couldn't be happier with the work done by Tri-State owner Charlie Dundas and his crew.

"Some of the hills are fairly steep, but they cut the path with such a gradual grade that even older or out-of-shape hikers can make it to the top and barely be breathing hard," England said. "And they did a great job, too, of having the trail look like a natural part of the landscape."

The trail leads past dozens of cairns -- from loosely consolidated nondescript piles, to carefully stacked waist-high columns, to downright imposing walls. One of the most interesting features along the path isn't a cairn at all, but an odd sandstone boulder England calls the Standing Stone.

"It's a huge, flat-faced piece of sandstone that has been stood on its end," he said. "It appears to have been shaped by tools of some sort, and it has pieces of metal embedded in it."

One particularly strange aspect to the Standing Stone is its orientation.

"If you come up here on the winter solstice and stand with your back to the flat face of the rock, you face the exact spot where the sun sets," England said. "That's one of the reasons some people think it might be Native American in origin. Places like this were often set up by Native Americans to pay respect to some natural occurrence."

Now that the trail is open, England said parks officials plan to erect explanatory signs to help hikers interpret what they're seeing.

"We're also working on a map that includes interpretive information, a brochure that people can take with them and refer to as they hike along," England said.

"The bottom line is that we know the cairns are something of unique cultural or historic value. We want the public to come and see them. We don't want them touched or disturbed, but we certainly want people to enjoy them."

Reach John McCoy at johnmc...@wvgazette.com or 304-348-1231.