What's with all those stacks of stones in the woods?

It would be hard to follow Southwestern trails without cairns. These little piles of rock help guide us along washes and into canyons, across folds of slickrock and timeless, high desert landscapes.

But as Robyn Martin wrote recently in High Country News, a different form of rock stacking has begun to creep into public lands.

She’s not talking about the cairns you find on your favorite trail. She’s talking about stone circles and stacks of rock that have sprung up along streambeds and other places. You may have seen them on the trail or in a state or national park: little stacks of stones, precariously balanced — some even artistic, perhaps, but clearly not left there by nature.

Martin writes that she suspects the practice may have begun near Sedona — presumably to mark vortexes, those supposed swirls of harmonic convergence. It started with about a dozen of them.

Now "there are hundreds. What’s more, the cairn craze has mushroomed, invading wilderness areas everywhere in the West,” Martin writes.

These modern-day totems are a form of New Age graffiti, “pointless reminders of the human ego,” she writes. At best, they are pointless, at worst, a form of litter.

Jennifer Burns, recreation staff officer with the Red Rock Ranger District of Coconino National Forest, said that about a decade ago, medicine wheels were all the rage in the Sedona area. These circles of stone were built “with the mistaken idea that it was a local Native American practice, but it was not.” The Forest Service was able to convince the public that Arizona tribes did no such thing, but “now we have people stacking rocks for various reasons.”

They mark trails.

They mark routes.

They mark a “vortex.”

People see other people doing it. So they do it.

“Some people are just into stacking rocks,” Burns said.

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David B. Williams was so fascinated by the practice that he wrote a book on the subject: “Cairns: Messengers in Stone.”

“What’s more basic than a pile of rocks to communicate with others? … We’ve been doing this for thousands of years,” Williams said, and we do it for a variety of reasons. Native cultures have used stone stacks for reasons both practical and sacred. They honor deities, remember the dead. The human impulse to stack rocks is difficult to explain, but it’s real.

“They are these most amazingly simple little structures that do carry so much meaning,” Williams said. “They’re pretty powerful.”

The most basic use of cairns is to mark a trail.

Some trails at national parks are so well-marked that you can follow the cairns at night, with a headlamp. You shouldn’t assume that — some trails are sketchy and hard to follow, even in broad daylight. The Park Service builds trails that correspond to the trails on your map, providing a framework of navigation, a lifeline back to the truck, a common language for hikers, rangers and Search and Rescue teams.

For some reason, people feel compelled to add cairns to these trails.

Others feel compelled to knock them down.

Williams, a former park ranger, wrote that one of his unofficial duties at Arches National Park in Utah was knocking down cairns — not all of them, just unnecessary ones that hikers had taken upon themselves to build. A cairn in the wrong place, no matter how well-intentioned, can lead others astray, or may simply be unnecessary.

Although Williams said he has knocked down a few cairns in the past, he’s not against them in principle.

“I completely disagree that cairns are bad. … Or if you go into the backcountry, you shouldn’t have to rely on cairns,” Williams said. “It’s context, it’s being aware of the landscape around you. If you do enough hiking you’re going to use them and take advantage of them.”

Not all public lands have trails. Some places are left to nature, and people who explore there are on their own. Somehow, cairns creep into the landscape anyway. Writer Craig Childs has noted this tendency for cairns to multiply in places without established trails, or campsites. Places land agencies have left wild, or tried to. It starts with a couple of route markers, until the cairns “swiftly overpopulate, establishing new colonies hither and yon, until you can’t go anywhere without seeing them,” Childs wrote in High Country News,  a non-profit publication and news agency that covers land and resources in the American West.

Tribes have built cairns as markers for centuries. Some of them are very useful, and very old, Childs writes. Cairns were left by pioneers and Paiutes. A few may have been placed by more modern explorers, people exploring slot canyons before Western bookshelves filled with guidebooks, before signs marked trailheads, before GPS.

When you go kicking stones, though, be prepared for some kickback

Martin’s essay unleashed a variety of responses. There were arguments about man’s place in nature, art, Leave No Trace ethics, the impact of 7 billion humans on the planet. One comment came from a professional stone balancer. (Who knew?) . Some stone stackers said they tore down their piles of stone when they were done. The local National Public Radio affiliate picked up on the discussion as well.

There seemed to be confusion over the difference between a cairn marking an established trail and a pile of rocks along Oak Creek to mark a vortex.

“There are sort of two things we’re talking about,” Williams said. “Piles of rock to mark a trail is one issue. Stacking stones is a different issue.”

But in both cases, context and quantity are more important than philosophical questions about the morality of stacking a few stones, or our right to do so, Williams said. A million or more visitors can have a big impact on a region.

“It’s not one or two stacks. It’s when you come across an area, particularly in national parks, when there are dozens or hundreds. … The builders don’t necessary understand the landscape around them and don’t understand that others might be bothered by it. When you have one cairn it’s fine, but all the sudden you have 60 … you can be degrading habitat in that area. These fragile ecosystems are being harmed by this proliferation of stacking stone.”

As Martin pointed out, stones can provide shelter for insects and small animals, and moving them can be disruptive.

That’s the point Coconino National Forest is trying to drive home. Red rock soils are notoriously fragile and prone to erosion. Not much holds them in place. A few plants. A hard crust known as cryptobiotic soil. And rocks.

“Anytime people are moving rocks around here, it’s really bad for the environment,” Burns said. “The rocks are what’s holding the soil together. … So it’s really a bad practice.”

Williams said that Acadia, Yosemite and Hawai'i Volcanoes national parks have had big problems with runaway stone stacking.

In Hawaii, the stack builders offend native cultures that have been placing cairns in the region for centuries, for religious reasons. Some cairn builders have been known to take stone right out of lava folds, which can throw off geologists tracking historic flows.

"I do consider national parks special and unique. And perhaps we should think more about what we do to the landscape,” Williams said.

The idea of unlimited personal freedom does not hold up in national parks, he said, where backcountry travel, camping and other activities come with a set of rules and responsibilities.

“Any time you go into a national park you’re already buying into a system of being told what not to do. You’re already following some rules that have been established.”

The Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management have always operated under the principle of multiple use, which means their lands are open to a variety of things: camping, fishing, hunting, mining, logging, biking, hiking, photography, climbing and so on. But more and more, both agencies must deal with the consequences of rising visitation, as legions of fun hogs arrive every weekend or every season. Agencies that might have once looked the other way when a few visitors stacked a few stones are now pointing out that, technically, it is against the rules, akin to leaving clusters of pottery shards at Pueblo ruins. Basically, stacking stones for no reason is on par with graffitti or littering.

Coconino National Forest gets about a million visitor days a year, Burns said. The results of that many visitors doing what they please is not always pretty.

“It just doesn’t really work here,” Burns said. It may be in our DNA to scratch our initials, stack stones, leave a mark, but Burns said that in places with high traffic, people “should resist it. What they should be proud of is not leaving a mark.”

We “go to wilderness to remove ourselves from the human saturation in our lives, not see mementos from other people’s lives,” Martin writes.

“Let’s end this invasive practice. Fight the urge to stack rocks and make your mark. … If you must worship in the wild, repress that urge to rearrange the rocks and just say a silent prayer to yourself. … Let’s check our egos at the trailheads and boat launches, and leave the earth’s natural beauty alone. Her geology, as it stands, is already perfect.”