glumshoe:

akishisen:

Apparently. I’m a park naturalist guess what. Stack rocks who cares. Just pick up your damn trash and dont take anything from the park you didnt take in with you. Moving 1 (one) rock is not going to collapse an ecosystem.

trashboat:

is this what we’re mad about today

hearthawk:

If I find your rock stack, and it is not serving as a marker for a trail or notice of a trail hazard, I WILL unstack your rocks and put them back. Nature is already encroached on enough without you deciding to ‘leave your mark’ with another stack of rocks.

glumshoe:

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. 

britney-j-christ:

I’m gonna leave a trace and it’s gonna be a cool ass rock tower in the woods :D

glumshoe:

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?

Hearthawk is overreacting and britney-j-christ was just uninformed, but like…. seriously? 

As a fellow park naturalist I’m ashamed of you. Looking the other way when people stack rocks is one thing, but actively encouraging people to do so because “who cares”? Does the park that employs you know that this is your attitude?

I work on the very edge of the native range of the highly endangered Eastern hellbender. Here is a study I hope you will read on how human activity, such as moving rocks and creating cairns, is associated with the destruction of hellbender habitat, and here is one of the photos used in the publication, showing a dead hellbender beside some decorative rock stacks:

It’s not just hellbenders–many other species of fish, amphibians, and invertebrates shelter under, lay their eggs upon, or forage for food in the same rocky environments. They are crushed, dried out, or deprived of habitat from unnecessary human movement of rocks. If people realized this, hopefully they would refrain from rock-stacking, and value the conservation of wildlife habitat over the pleasure of putting stones on top of each other!

Perhaps your park does not use cairns as trail markers, but many do. They’re an unobtrusive alternative to ugly metal signs. Creating unauthorized piles of rocks in the wood creates a very real safety hazard by confusing what is and what is not meant to be a trail marker. People get led astray and lost due to this–the notes on this post are full of stories of people who have mistaken recreational cairns for purposeful ones. 

Of course moving one rock isn’t going to collapse an ecosystem. But it’s never just one rock. Millions of people visit their parks every year, and with decorative rock-stacking being “in vogue” for some reason, that’s millions of rocks moved and millions of potential habitats destroyed. Is it inevitable? Maybe. But it’s absolutely not something we should be encouraging the public to do.