People who cairn too much

Honestly, I had not thought of this scenario. So thanks for pointing it out.

Also what gets interesting is when the forest service (or contractors) mark trees with a similar color as the blaze and you accidentally follow those.

I actually had to stack three rocks last week at the end of the short hike in Cottonwood Canyon Narrows in southern Utah. We parked one car on the north end and walked the 1.5 miles or so to the south end. We overshot the take out point by a hundred yards. There was absolutely no hint of where to exit the canyon other than it had opened up enough to get to the road. I did see one rock on top of another near where the exit point might have been. I said to my friend, "Two rocks do not a cairn make." So I added a third to make it a little more obvious.

Cottonwood Canyon Narrows

In my area, route marking cairns are a hot topic in both roadless and wilderness settings. Random "duck rocks" need to go away in most instances. The case can made that cairns placed for established routes, and historic ones, need to be kept, and maintained. We have a few in the Bighorn Mountains, Bighorn NF, and BLM lands surrounding the range that have Native American roots. Others were put up on the first system trails in the first years of the Forest Service to mark trails that resisted construction.

I and some other volunteers have been putting up ten, so far, well constructed, substantial cairns on old system trails that have very minimal construction and no signage at key junctions with other trails. These are trails that may not see a trail crew in 8-10 years according to the local forest plan. No signage. That FS class of trial does have signage but our cairns do line up, close to or at least visible to where the USGS and FS topo maps have the junctions. It is important we don't lose these primitive trails. Mark them to too well, or up the classification of these trails with full tread and signage, and we will lose them to the mountain bike/e-bike crowd. Next summer, we are working with some horse packers to at least hoof them up a bit.

The BLM in my area a few years ago went stupid about cairns and was ripping them all out and replacing with Carsonite markers on trails. The fiberglass markers rarely survive the first winter. Or wildlife or cows. I finally went to our BLM District office and sicced their archeologists-history people on the trail crew leaders and got that stopped. The BLM especially is the stewards of historical trails in our area.

If I ever would have had a daughter, I was going to name her Cairn, but pronounced Karen.