I knelt down and touched one of the stones. It was rough, already warming from the morning sun.

Someone put these stones here. A small hearth in the middle of a stone ring. And here they have stayed, untouched and unmoved.

For hundreds of years.

I first spied these tipi rings thirteen years ago, during an antelope trend count flight.

It has taken me 13 years to come back.

I tried to find them once before, again following a lek survey out here in my favorite part of the desert. But I was one ridge off.

Which, here, meant I was off by miles. But today, I have found them.

These are true tipi rings, the rings of rocks once used to hold down the bottom flaps of Indian tipis. Not like most of the "tipi rings" closer to home, most of which are actually the rocks once used to hold down bison hides to dry after the flesh had been scraped off. Those rings are smaller, and kinda haphazard, since bison are hardly round.

But no, Native Americans once camped here. Slept here, their robes piled up against the walls of the hide tent. I wonder if they awoke to curse the sharp pebbles of conglomerate that cover the ground here. The kind that left two gouges in my palm as I scrambled down the slope to get here.

I ask these questions out loud, knowing there will be no answer. There is no one here. Has not been for a long time. And they wouldn't know 21st century English even if they were.

Shoshone, probably.

I can see why they liked this spot. Sheltered from the prevailing western winds, and any errant cold north wind that may blow. The stream right beside it, vast hunting plains to the east and south.

I leave the stone circle as I entered it, through the gap on the eastern side where the open flap would have been. Though long vacant, it would seem rude to step in any other way.

As I leave, I stoop down through the imaginary portal, and then rise up, as if first greeting the day, and try to imagine the land as they saw it.

And chuckle to myself when I realize no imagining is necessary. This land, at least this part of it, is the same. Except maybe for the missing bison herds. And wolves and grizzlies.

"At least we haven't messed this place up," I say aloud, to no one.

At least we haven't messed this place up...

Yet.