Cairns and LNT?

[Diplomatic Mike]

If you want to make things easier, why not lay proper trails that could allow wheelchair access? Maybe toilets every mile? Coffee stalls every 2 miles?

[James holden]

Not up here please … guidebooks use them as reference points for climbing routes … They often mark the start of climbs or the descents

Destroying them can leave the next party searching dangerously in the dark for their descent or send em up the wrong route

Unless yr an expert/local who knows that its just something built by tourist, leave em be

Im not quite sure what the ethics are in other places, but dont import them here

[Diplomatic Mike]

Unofficial 'trails' do form to popular areas. I feel that is a natural process. However, i don't think that things should be made artificialy easier for folks.

[Harald Hope]

Chris Townsend can be sort of excused if he's Scottish I guess. It's somewhat painful to see the initial mistake made by John Muir and other outdoor fans, ie, mistaking the jumbled up overgrown state of the 'wilderness' they encountered at a very specific historical moment for some natural event, when what it actually was was something akin to weeds in a garden, ie, the First Nations, aka, Indians, had maintained this land for thousands of years, and used fire extensively to modify their ecosystem. Majorly, we might note. So when disease and genocide basically wiped most of them out here, that care vanished basically overnight, and a 'wild' state not unlike what you would see if you suddenly stopped caring for your garden occurred. An excellent book, covering most of the newer research on this matter, is 1491, but these matters have been known for a long time, especially the question of fires in creating a habitable ecosystem. If you are interested in this stuff, I strongly suggest you read 1491, it's very good.

While he's talking about the Highlands I guess, the issue is even more extreme here in the US, where fire suppression has totally wiped out anything even remotely resembling natural 'wilderness' except maybe at high altitudes above the treelines, so to speak of 'lnt' in this context is absurd.

The problem is most of us have no idea of what nature actually is, we just have these two extremes: man's world, and the mythically and mystically pure, separated from man, 'nature'. This problem I would imagine is even more extreme in places like Scotland. Norway has a much more balanced view of nature in my opinion, it took me decades to really understand it, coming from growing up here in the US with this confused binary view of nature of human OR wilderness. They use paint on trees to mark trails, snow and all that. Makes sense to me.

I saw this problem in its most extreme form in Point Reyes, where decades now of fire suppression have created a wildly unnatural state where the forests are almost totally inaccessible because they are so overgrown in their underbrush, especially with poison oak. This is not natural, and it's a massive trace left by our ongoing ignorant and self-centered forestry practices. The self centered part occurs because people lucky or rich enough to live on the outskirts of such areas demand that all fires that threaten their prize houses and 'ranches', which for example are seen on the Northern side of the Ventana wilderness be put out immediately, leaving such a build up of dry wood that when fires do break out, they burn so hot that they actually destroy the underlying ecosystem, which then either cannot recover (fire triggered seeds burn up, for instance), or takes many decades to recover, by which time the next catastrophic fire occurs. This is jus tone example.

As to cairns, I like them, they are made out of natural materials sourced from the immediate ecosystem. If a trail goes bad or wild or vanishes under fall leaves, which happens, the cairn will remain visible, unless some jerk decided to be the aesthetic arbitrator for what is safe, required, and desirable. I would suggest an alternate treatment of the cairn: it was put there because someone felt the path was unclear. It's irrelevant if YOU do not feel that way. I got lost once for real, and was close to the now overgrown trail, and would have loved to have seen a few cairns to help me find the trail again. Found it by luck more than anything else. Now if say, 10 years before, when the trail was not overgrown, some lnt confused person had said, the trail is clear today, and knocked them over, that that's, they are gone.

I also like cairns because they are a very nice expression of the fact that we are not in a mythical wilderness, we are also part of nature, and a cairn simply is a nice way to express that relationship.

The first people's had trail systems that they followed like we follow highways, and they knew them that well.

It would be nice to see the original damage done by well intentioned guys like John Muir start to be undone. One thing that was very telling to me was a story of him running across some local natives, aka Indians, in the Sierras, and him getting outraged because he felt they were desecrating his mystical 'wilderness'. Which they had created over centuries. This ignorance plagues us to this day. I remember the first time I started to learn about the nature management Indians used, it really bugged me because it so conflicted with what I had been trained to believe, the myth of the 'wilderness' and it's savage unspoiled inhabitants.

Now the stuff I really hate is garbage on the trail, that's pure man created artificial industrial waste. In nature there is no waste, ever. Only man creates waste and garbage and pollution, it's our signature. At least industrial man.

[Kier Selinsky]

+1 Harald. You said what I meant about 10X better than me.

[Mobile Calculator]

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[EndoftheTrail]

"I was struck last night when reading Chris Townsend's The Backpacker's Handbook, 4th Edition that he said he regularly destroys cairns as they detract from the wilderness experience."

Sorry to jump in late — but is Mr. Townsend talking about cairns left at trail junctions? Or outright wilderness?

My view: For those who are not fully experienced, keep to trails while you learn — and cairns are certainly OK. No need for any pretensions to "wilderness experience" when you are on a trail — so DON'T BE DESTROYING any cairns for your own egoistic wilderness imagining's — while possibly putting less experienced hikers in jeopardy!

But true wilderness? Don't leave cairns to spoil it for those who have expended a lot of time and effort to get away from trails for their true wilderness experience! Don't feel comfortable? Then stay on the trail or don't stray too far away.

[Brian UL]

+1 Harald
Im so happy to see others get it.
In my mind whats really going on is that antisocial people feel offended when they see any signs of humanity. They want a Disney World experience of what "wilderness" may have been like before the dawn of man, or maybe they want to pretend they are on a great mission of discovery and they are first man to roam these scared grounds.
But then reality hits and they are reminded that man is part of nature and always has been. Most every where you go you are walking where countless men woman and children have walked before. Even the most reclusive spot may have been the site of a village or even a city at one time. Nature and man are in a constant state of flux. There is no such thing as a real timeless untouched wilderness.
The real challenge is preserving and living within nature so that the ecosystems remain healthy and our impact is not an eye sore and too disruptive to the natural balance.

[Bob Gross]

In some places where I travel, like Yosemite National Park, there are lots of trails. It is not too unusual to find a small cairn of rocks at a trail junction, but it would be unusual to find a cairn out along a trail.

I go off-trail in Yosemite as well, and there is one standard route that I travel routinely, like every year or two. After the twentieth time that way, I knew that there are no cairns at all. Then on time number 21, I found new cairns. Hmmm. As long as they stayed exactly on the correct route, I left them standing. As soon as they diverged off into never never land, I destroyed them. Some newbie would just follow them and get lost.

–B.G.–

[Anonymous]

"this is an old issue, and not a simple one, with a one size fits all solution."

+1 to your entire post!

[Roger Caffin]

In my experience, cairns are often made by novices while waiting on a good track for the rest of the party. Can't say they are a real lot of use there!

I have made a few cairns in really remote wilderness at critical junctions, but I always removed them on our return.

Some cairns however … might be hard to remove!

(Our UK readers might recognise this one. I think it was Cross Fell?)

Cheers

[Luke Schmidt]

Roger according to my Boys Scout cousin there is a tradtion at Philemont. When a scout troop climbes Mt. Baldy (the highest mountain there) they each carry a rock to stack on top. They call it the "Mt. Baldy Improvement Project" apparrently the goal is to build a massive cairn ontop of the mountain and raise the elevation from 12,500 ft. to 13,000 feet.

[Paul McLaughlin]

Cairns on a trail I would leave undisturbed. Cairns not on a trail I would knock down, primarily because off-trail cairns tend to keep everyone n the same route and thus create a use tail, rather than everyone finding their own way and spreading the impact out far enough that it is not noticeable. And while I do not pretend that no one else has ever been to the off-trail places I go, I like to be in places where not so many people go, so it does matter to me how much visible impact there has been.

Do I have the right to establish a new trail in a National Forest or National Park? I do not. And neither does anyone else have the right to decide on their own to establish a new trail. Thus no one has the right to build cairns in that situation – away from an established trail in a National Forest or National Park. Thus any cairn in that situation should not be there. I have been told by a former backcountry ranger that this was Park service policy when he was on the job, and he continues to knock over cairns in off-trail situations.

[Kattt]

You make some good points but:
" I have been told by a former backcountry ranger that this was Park service policy when he was on the job, and he continues to knock over cairns in off-trail situations."

Just because rangers do it, does not necessarily make it right.

[Anonymous]

"I have made a few cairns in really remote wilderness at critical junctions, but I always removed them on our return."

Good form.

[Paul Wagner]

What happens in Scotland (where the author lives and hikes), the Mediterranean (where there is almost no wilderness at all), or the Himalayas (where cairns are a cultural artifact) doesn't really have any place in a discussion about policies and philosophies here in North America. Completely different issues there.

In the sierra, the USFS makes a distinction between trails (marked clearly and maintained by USFS or volunteers) and routes, which are use trails that are not maintained at all. But those routes regularly include cairns, and are an accepted part of the wilderness management policy. (There are also maintained trails across terrain that has no better way to mark the trail than cairns, and as such they are part of the maintained trail system.)

When I see cairns I generally leave them alone. Partly because I don't know who put them there, and don't know why there were put there. But I never create a cairn, and only VERY rarely add to a cairn, when I am on a maintained trail, spent some time trying to find the trail, and found a cairn that had fallen down.

I understand that some people would like to hike where no man has ever gone before, or at least feel that way. If you really are disturbed by finding a cairn, try hiking in more isolated areas. Those areas exist, and we've done hikes in Yosemite where we hiked for miles without seeing a trail, cairn, or blaze.

But to appoint yourself as the cairnmaster, in charge of destroying cairns wherever you find them, seems to me not only arrogant but a bit stupid. You are making assumptions with knowledge.

On the other hand, don't get me started about campsites with neanderthal furniture carved from trees or built up from rocks…

[Diplomatic Mike]

"But to appoint yourself as the cairnmaster, in charge of destroying cairns wherever you find them, seems to me not only arrogant but a bit stupid. You are making assumptions with knowledge.

On the other hand, don't get me started about campsites with neanderthal furniture carved from trees or built up from rocks…"

What's wrong with neanderthal furniture? Aren't you making assumptions without knowledge?

[Mike W]

>> Im not quite sure what the ethics are in other places, but dont import them here <<

+1 for Eric's comments.

Obviously this is something that varies considerably from area to area. Knocking down cairns in some of the areas that I hike in would be considered irresponsible.

[Sumi Wada]

Cairns have been helpful when I needed them. I really don't notice them when I don't need them. I can't imagine them "ruining" a backcountry experience.

I don't make one without knocking it down on the way out. I never knock one down that I didn't build myself.

[Joe Clement]

Call me a romantic, but when I find a cairn here in the southwest, I just assume it was made by the Anasazi, smile, and walk on.

The PC/religious aspects some people apply to LNT make me want to barf most of the time.

[Chris S]

"I agree with what Art said earlier (9:42 MDT)."

I agree with Michael.

[Jim Colten]

Warning: this is not exactly on topic, but it might make you chuckle anyway …

t'was said above: I agree with what Art said earlier (9:42 MDT).

a portion of what Art said is where those who are not Danial Boone may wander astray

Of Mr. Boone it is said that while back in "civilization" he was once asked, "Do you ever get lost out there in the wilderness?"

His response was something like this "No ma'am, I've never been lost. Mind you, I was a mite confused for a week once."

[Anonymous]

"What's wrong with neanderthal furniture?"

What, exactly, is Neanderthal furniture?

[EndoftheTrail]

"What, exactly, is Neanderthal furniture?"

[Anonymous]

Thanks, Ben. I'll be ordering some of that for my patio. :=)

[Author]

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