When did hikers develop the collective impulse to stack rocks and make obnoxious, useless decorative cairns at every park and river they visit? I don’t remember seeing them as a kid except as trail markers, but now they’re EVERYWHERE. What part of “leave no trace” don’t people understand?
I'm gonna leave a trace and it's gonna be a cool ass rock tower in the woods :D
Please don’t!
If you want to build rock towers, get your own rocks and build them at home. That’s perfectly fine. But rocks provide vital habitat for wildlife, especially in stream bed; moving and stacking them leaves them without shelter, crushes them, exposes their eggs, and leads to soil erosion and bank destruction. Leave them where they are.
Furthermore, cairns are used as trail markers to indicate routes. Creating pointless cairns for funzies and Instagram can actually be dangerous to other hikers who rely on them for navigation, and immensely frustrating for rangers. We don’t say “leave no trace” to be mean--we’re trying to protect both the environment and our visitors.
