Cairns

I am a curmudgeon, and I have a pet peeve.

Our friend mrguy south is a curmudgeon and a landscape architect, and leading up to his recent visit I had intended to ask him whether he and I shared this particular pet peeve.

While he was visiting, and before I could even ask, it came up in conversation. He was showing us photos from a camping trip and there it was in one of his photos. I didn't even know what they were called until he went OFF about how much he hates cairns.

Cairn: A mound of stones erected as a memorial or marker.

The people of yore made cairns to mark important sites, like graves. But if you are making a cairn, unless you have gotten in a time machine and are making one in the very distant past, you are just an asshole. Your cairn is visual noise that you are making in order to stake your claim to territory so that everybody knows you were there first. Your cairn is meaningless and you are, in the language of my people, a dick.

Mrguy south describes himself as a cairn kicker. "If I see one, I will kick it over. Even if you're right there and you just made it, I will come kick it over." Right on to you mrguy south, and to the National Park Service's Yosemite rangers who just posted about it on their Facebook page. They have described cairn-making as "a mark of human impact [that] is distracting in a wilderness setting. Building rock cairns also disturbs small insects, reptiles, and microorganisms that call the underside home!”.

And they say it's ok to knock them down. This photo is from 2019. My impression? It looks like an overfull cat box.

Kick em!!