PITTSFIELD — On Wednesday morning, snowy mountains sprawled behind a metal monolith, shiny enough to shoot rays of late morning sun in all directions.
Several hours later, it disappeared.
Following a pattern that first took place in Utah, then Romania, California, and now dozens of locations worldwide, the monolith appeared last week, attracted visitors, attention and speculation, then vanished. It’s the only monolith reported so far in Vermont.
A hiker discovered the metal prism early last week at the summit of a trail located on property owned by the Riverside Farm, a wedding venue in Pittsfield.
Late Wednesday afternoon, Peter Borden, general manager at Riverside Farm, received an email from a friend who had gone looking for the structure and found that it had disappeared. When Borden made the climb that night to confirm, he found only the base of the structure, sand and footprints.
“After it got dark, someone walked off with it,” he said. “I had to know, so we hiked up as a family with our sleds. And it’s gone.”
Along with owning the venue, Joe De Sena is the founder and CEO of Spartan, an organization that hosts endurance and obstacle racing events. Given that Riverside Farm was the organization’s birthplace — and the act of carrying the metal structure up a steep hillside is an fundamentally athletic endeavor — locals theorize that a Spartan athlete was responsible for assembling the structure.
“Considering the thing is on top of the mountain, and it’s a relatively good size, it had to be someone with that kind of fitness level,” Borden said.
De Sena said he has no idea how it landed onsite; he hasn’t been on the farm for weeks.
“My wife and I thought it was a joke, like it was Photoshopped,” he said. “None of us believed it was really there.”
Ten million people are involved in the “Spartan universe,” De Sena said. Many have come to the farm for weddings, so there’s a plentiful pool of people who could have completed the task.
The hike’s trailhead was busy Wednesday morning, and though some hike the trail regularly, most visitors told VTDigger they had come specifically to see the monolith.
“A lot of people have been inside for so long,” Borden said Wednesday, before the monolith disappeared. “We have families, and grandfathers, and all these people going up to see the monolith on snowshoes. People are just getting out right now. That’s exciting.”
Monolith madness in Vermont
A team from Utah’s Division of Wildlife Resources, flying a helicopter over the desert to monitor big-horned sheep, spotted a shiny piece of metal in a canyon in late November. A photo posted to Facebook by the Utah Department of Public Safety set off a chain reaction, and soon, monoliths reminiscent of the one featured in the 1968 film “2001: A Space Odyssey” appeared all over the world.
Theories about the origins of the first monolith range from extraterrestrial activity to placement by the cast of the HBO series “Westworld,” which filmed near the location, to John McCraken, a minimalist sculptor who died in 2011.
Utah’s monolith was discovered in November, but photographs from Google show the sculpture likely dates back to at least 2016. The sculpture was removed by outdoor enthusiasts who thought the swarm of tourists coming to see the sculpture would damage the fragile ecosystem.
Despite the Bureau of Land Management’s statement that “it is illegal to install structures or art without authorization on federally managed public lands, no matter what planet you’re from,” the federal agency asked the hikers to return the sculpture while it conducted an investigation.
Though the sculpture that prompted the worldwide movement clearly wasn’t created in reference to the tumult of 2020, some draw a connection between the movement and the new year.
Cyclical evolution of mankind
Janie Cohen, director of the Fleming Museum of Art at the University of Vermont, didn’t think much of the structure in Utah when it appeared widely in the news. At first, she didn’t think it was a significant piece of art, but with further examination, she changed her mind.
She says the monoliths act the way good art should — by inviting varying interpretations, more questions than answers and making reference to other cultural phenomena.
Cohen was also particularly interested in the “2001: Space Odyssey” connection. The film, based on the writings of Arthur C. Clarke, includes an imposing black structure that provides a connection between the past and the future.
“What that represented in the film was this kind of cyclical evolution of humankind,” she said. “So here we are, at the end of this absolutely horrific year. We’re bored, and we’re antsy, and we will really want something to distract us. And we’re also really aware of our need to evolve.”
It’s made all the more interesting by the fact that the first sculpture wasn’t built as a memorial to the year.
“It’s something that’s been sitting there waiting, and it was discovered at the perfect moment,” she said.
Grounding in nature
Pam Franks, who is director of the Williams College Museum of Art and has backgrounds in modern art and sculpture, sees the value of literal reflection in a natural setting. Indoors, she said people are able to ground themselves within the vertical and horizontal expanse of a building, but outside, that process becomes more difficult.
“When you come up on them, you could see yourself reflected, and you would have a sense of your own scale in nature,” she said. “That’s an interesting thing about being in the landscape as a person — what do you measure yourself against?”
On skis, snowshoes and hiking boots, visitors to the monolith climbed a steep trail covered in about a foot of snow on Wednesday, and seemed to enjoy the opportunity for outdoor reflection — literal or figurative.
Given that there was no property damage, and he always welcomes visitors, property owner Joe De Sena has enjoyed the mystery. And, as far as theories go, he likes to stick with the extraterrestrial.
“For 20-plus years, I’ve been begging people to get off the couch and get some exercise, climb the mountain — climb any mountain,” he said. “It took some aliens to get them to move.”
