“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.
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
We're supposed to be touching grass, not rocks
But we also want to ban lawns and create natural biomes, which we don’t touch
So what do we touch?
I know what we don't