“Cairns are a nuanced topic,” Death Valley spokesperson Abby Wines told SFGATE in a statement.
While some of the cairns that mark hiking trails and routes are done by park rangers, most are created “by hikers trying to pay it forward to help other hikers,” Wines told SFGATE. “These cairns are useful and should be left where they are.”
She also said that sometimes cairns are used to mark historic features.
“Cairns were used to mark boundaries of mining claims and land survey points in this area in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” she said. “Now these are helpful for historical archaeologists and should be left in place, just like historic trash around old mining camps should be left in place.”
Wines said that guests should never build cairns but also should avoid knocking them down.
I love how some of the most obscure shit we argue over somehow ends up being these huge national conversations months later.
Can't wait for the media blitz on the scourge of outdoor cats.
I am not looking forward to the chance of "until a magical device is invented that can detect consent for being born in advance, no babies should ever be born again" discourse going national, especially if it's used to justify planet-burning levels of industrialized meat production.
I hate to tell you this but it already happened when Johnathan Franzen published a book which is like half anti outdoor cat agitprop (Freedom, 2010)
By making the world better and not fucking up the environment?
(sorry if this was meant as a joke I can never tell)
fucking up the environment
Nooooo 10 rocks are now vertical instead of horizontal. The environment is fucked now
Noooooooo I threw this one piece of trash on the ground the environment is fucked
Noooooooo I dumped one pan of used motor oil on some weeds the environment is fucked
Noooooooo I bought a bitcoin mining rig and doubled my electric bill the environment is fucked
You win, stacking rocks is the same as dumping oil. My mind has been changed
The point is that there are many things that aren't too big of deal if one person does it, but become major problems when a lot of people do it.
Which is a garbage point to make because you're clearly aware that doing this stuff is bad, but justify doing it because other people should stop
Is this akin to the recycling 'we all have to do our part' schtick pushed by the oil companies?
The environment is fucked now
Locally, yes, it actually is to some extent after that.
Of course you could choose not to do that but the impulse to be a contrarian asshole is strong, isn't it?
Have you read the article?? Which part says they're "fucking up the environment"?
Yeah, you're thinking of a different article. This one doesn't actually say what the impact of building a cairn is, and I am actually curious what the impact is for building cairns from rocks in a (relatively) dry place. The stream-bed perturbation discussion was one thing, and I am curious how much of that applies to this different context.
rocks are essential parts of the habitats of some creatures. disturbing them is disturbing their habitats. do you understand the concept of "leave no trace" at all?
was stonehenge bad?
Im ootl on this one, why is stacking rocks bad? I mean, every person cant stack rocks or it would clean out environments, but like, some rock stacking is fine no?
Stonehenge is neutral, but the human population was much much lower back then. There's too many of us now to be lenient about stone stacking.
Someone pointed out that the Instagram trend of building cairns from streambed rocks can do a surprising amount of damage to the downstream ecology. Some took it as basically saying "don't touch rocks" and started arguing against that, and a struggle session was born
But we also want to ban lawns and create natural biomes, which we don’t touch
So what do we touch?
They are bad generally speaking. The article poses a couple exceptions I could agree with (ones put in place by rangers and other professionals for the purpose of navigation or marking an important historical landmark) and others I could give a fuck less about (demarcating old mining claims).
getting to the party line requires a struggle session
What about ovoos? PRC has outlawed worshipping them but I think that's an L.
we really are just a MIC testbed for potent psych weaponry, aren't we
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
whenever i hear "cairn" i think of this kinda thing:
Show
but it's always about piddly little stacks of rocks
I don't think people need to/should make cairns in shared spaces, but it definitely feels cruel and ill-omened to knock them down or disturb them.
Here's a genuine question: environmentally speaking, is it better to let disturbed rocks sit where they are, or knock them back into a more "natural" and random position?
Broke: Knocking over cairns because we should leave no trace
Woke: Knocking over cairns because they are reminiscent of asherath poles and are an affront to God
