Debate: marking your trail with cairns vs. leaving no trace at all?

I was hiking the John Muir Trail last summer and saw this huge stack of rocks someone built right at a junction... it totally threw me off because the trail was clearly marked already. On one hand, cairns can help in sketchy weather or low visibility, but on the other hand, leaving them everywhere kinda defeats the whole 'leave no trace' idea. So where do you draw the line between helpful and harmful on a route?

2 comments

2 Comments

robinj291d ago

Read an article in Backpacker a while back about cairns in the Sierra. The rangers there spend a ton of time knocking down unnecessary ones because tourists keep building them everywhere. It's gotten so bad in some spots that actual route-finding cairns get lost in the noise. The piece said the only real justification is above treeline in whiteout conditions where you can't see ten feet. That made sense to me. A stack of rocks at a clear trail junction is just noise, but one on a featureless granite slab in a storm might save your bacon.

evan_wilson181d ago

That JMT stack sounds annoying. I once built a cairn on a trail in the Whites to mark a tricky spot for my group, only to realize five minutes later I'd led us right to a dead end. I'm basically the guy who needs GPS to find my own car in a parking lot, so maybe I'm not the best person to judge what's helpful. For me, the line is simple: if the trail is clear and someone's making a rock tower just for fun, that's a problem. But if you're above treeline with fog rolling in and a tiny pile of rocks keeps you on the path, I'll take that over getting lost any day. What do you think about leaving cairns only in those legit low visibility spots?