aspen trees by shepherds, many of them Basque and Irish American, throughout the Western United States. They have been documented across northern California and in areas such as Boise, Idaho and Steamboat Springs, Colorado. Basque immigrants from the Pyrenees came to work as shepherds in the mid-19th century, and, spending long hours alone in forests, etched drawings and poetry into the aspen trees with a knife or even their fingernails. One expert alone has recorded around 20,000 tree carvings across California, Nevada, and Oregon, dating from the early 1900s. The markings turned darker against the pale bark as the tree healed itself. Aspens typically only live around 100 years, but arborglyphs have alsp been found on dead fallen trees. The subject of these carvings range from dates and names to quite detailed drawings, sometimes depicting explicit sexual themes. The carvings often reflect their lonely lives. Wildfires, disease, and natural deterioration are reducing the number of the aspen arborglyphs. A grove of aspens with Basque arborglyphs in the Steens Mountain region of southeastern Oregon have been designated as Oregon Heritage Trees. A project was run by the USDA Forest Service in 1997 to record and study arborglyphs in the Fremont National Forest of southeastern Oregon, near Lakeview. Chumash arborglyph The glyph on the "scorpion tree" (now known as the Chumash Arborglyph) viewed from Painted Rock in Carrizo Plain, California, shows the counterclockwise rotation of stars around Polaris, apparently showing Ursa Major in relation to Polaris. Paleontologist Rex Saint Onge, who saw the tree in 2006, realised that the tree was carved by Native Americans, specifically Chumash people. The ancient oak in the Santa Lucia Mountains in San Luis Obispo County had the outline of a lizard-like being with six legs, nearly tall, carved into its trunk, and included a rectangular crown and two large circles. The Chumash had painted similar designs on rock formations in California. Saint Onge waa not the first European American to speculate that Chumash paintings might have astronomical implications. In the 1970s, anthropologist Travis Hudson's book Crystals in the Sky combined his observations of the rock art of the Chumash people with cultural data recorded by ethnographer John P. Harrington nearly a century earlier. The lower half of the lizard-like image is actually a graphic representation of the movement of a shadow over the course of a year. This was made with a Chumash invention similar to