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(CNN) – The mysterious monolith discovered last week in a Utah desert simply disappeared, but was not taken over by aliens or government conspiracies. Another phenomenon moved him: TikTokers.
Ross Bernards, an outdoor lifestyle and adventure photographer from Colorado, told CNN that he saw a group of four remove the monolith Friday night.
Bernards, who has about a decade of experience hiking and navigating deserts, set out to capture photos of the world-famous monolith with a group of friends last Friday after determining its location earlier in the week.
A group of four
After he and his friends had reached the location of the monolith and had been taking photos for over an hour, they heard the voices of a new group turning the corner towards the location. Bernards assumed the group of four was there to take photos too, but that wasn’t the case.
“They immediately started to really push him, like putting all their body weight on him,” Bernards said. “It took maybe three big shoves for that thing to get up a little bit and start to roll over.”
As soon as they were able to release the entire monolith, it fell straight to the ground and made a loud crash. It sounded like someone knocked their biggest pot of stew off a ladder as hard as they could, Bernards said.
“Once that happened, one of them said that’s why you don’t leave garbage in the desert,” Bernards said.
Group of four people removing the Utah monolith.
‘Leave no trace’
The group of four took the large pieces of the monolith and placed them on a wheelbarrow and said “leave no trace” as they removed it, Bernards said.
According to Bernards, the phrase “Leave no trace” is a well-known principle in the outdoor community that encourages people who visit the great outdoors to protect the environment by minimizing its impact.
Bernards and his friends did not stop the group from removing the monolith because they agreed that it was necessary to remove it because the area is not prepared for the kind of attention it was receiving and could cause damage that would negatively impact the terrain, he said.
LOOK: Adventurers find the Utah monolith despite the fact that the authorities did not publish its location
“It was great to see him, but he also needed to go,” Bernards said. “Wilderness, Mother Nature, is the artist up there and we must leave the art to her.”
Public lands
One of the people who helped remove the monolith announced in a social media post Tuesday that he and a team were responsible for removing the monolith on the night of November 27 at around 8:30 p.m.
Sylvan Christensen, who has nearly 30,000 followers on TikTok, posted a video of the monolith tied to a wheelbarrow and carried with the blurred faces of the individuals who removed the structure. Since then, the post has been viewed nearly 200,000 times on TikTok.
“Don’t leave your personal property on public land if you don’t want it taken away,” Christensen wrote in a caption along with a hashtag #LeaveNoTrace (#NoDejarTrace).
Christensen identifies himself as a Moab Adventure Tours guide, according to his social media.
“We removed the Utah Monolith because there are clear precedents for how we share and standardize the use of our public lands, natural wildlife, native plants, freshwater sources, and human impacts on them,” the group said in an emailed statement. to CNN.
“The mystery was the infatuation and we want to use this time to unite the people behind the real problems here – we are losing our public lands – things like this don’t help.”
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