Cairn on Mt. Flora
I marveled at the sculpture of rocks, seemingly balancing one upon another, forming a sculpture that towered five feet high. It reminded me of the childhood game of Jenga, where you pile wooden blocks one on top of another without the pile crashing. How had they managed to balance one rock upon the other? I wondered too whether this was the some culmination of many a hiker who came before or one artistic hiker who had a lot of time on their hands.
If you spend enough time scaling Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, you will ultimately come across a lot of cairns — piles of rocks that denote the trail as you climb above timberline across the tundra. Cairns a life savers when climbing Colorado’s Fourteeners, as otherwise, you could quite easily get off route into a precarious situation.
Sometimes, a cairn is simply three, four or five rocks sort of plopped along the trail. But other cairns are towers of individual pieces of granite, that can reach up to six feet high along the summits of the peaks. They are works of art unto themselves and I feel inspired to keep pushing along when sighting these landmarks.
Cairns have been around a lot longer than people have been hiking the Rocky Mountains. The use of cairns go back to prehistoric times, where they were not only used as landmarks but for other purposes as well. They have often been used for ceremonial purposes such as marking burial grounds, but also for hunting, as well as for marking caches.
Hikers passing by often add a stone, as a small bit of maintenance to counteract the wind and snow that can topple the cairns. I’ve often heard people refer to cairns as “ducks” as well, supposedly because they sometimes have a “beak” pointing in the direction of the route. The expression “two rocks do not make a duck” reminds hikers that just one rock resting upon another could be the result of accident or nature rather than intentional trail marking.
As a hiker, you have to be careful about adding new cairns as there is nothing more frustrating when scaling a peak than seeing an abundance of cairns seemingly going in every direction. Rather than providing clear direction, I become frustrated with not knowing which cairns to follow. Nevertheless, being directionally challenged myself when it comes to route-finding, a large pile of rocks is a welcome sight for me, much better than following the proverbial trail of bread crumbs.
