Picture yourself exploring a river by canoe and feeling solitude, and then around the next bend is a billboard reminding you that someone else was here first. To some, these rock stacks stick out just as much. Consider finding another way to artfully connect with the river.
Instead of making art, look for art within the natural world. Place a few leaves in an intricate pattern for the foreground of your photos. Try meditating on how the water moves across, around, over, and under the river stones. Pick up a rock and look at how many insects have made a home there, and then gently place it back in the same place with the same orientation.
And if you decide to stack dry rocks from a river bank, take your photos, make your memories, and then put everything back the way it was. Find art and personal connections in nature without moving rocks. We hope this has expanded your thinking on the subject, and hope you will leave the river landscape the same as how you found it, and take with you only memories when you leave.
We greatly appreciate our business partners for their support and commitment to the health of the Ausable River watershed. To find out how you can partner with the Ausable River Association, click here.
Search form Search. Photo credit: Brendan Wiltse One purpose of a rock cairn is for guiding people. Photo credit: By Daniel Case Rock stacking can be detrimental to the sensitive ecosystems of rivers and streams. Photo credit: By Fredlyfish4 Salamanders and crayfish also make their homes under rocks, and rock moving can destroy their homes, and even lead to direct mortality of these creatures. More recently, park officials began creating them on hiking trails — especially potentially confusing paths — to help ensure hikers don't get lost.
The Bates cairns , as they became known, consisted of a rectangular stone balanced atop two legs, then topped with one stone pointing to the trail. These cairns were replaced by standard ones in the s and s. But the park began rebuilding the historic Bates cairns in the s.
Acadia now contains a mixture of both. What's concerning scientists today is the new practice of creating rock piles as an art form, or for alluring social media posts. For stacking rocks is not an innocuous practice.
Many insects and mammals head under rocks to live, reproduce or escape their predators. So move a rock, and you might destroy a home. It's kind of hard not to. Stacking rocks at a beach with a rocky shore is both meditative and distracting enough to keep me from looking at my phone. And when I'm at a lakefront or seaside, I don't want to waste my time in a beautiful location scrolling through Instagram.
I do stretches, look along the water's edge for tadpoles or water bugs, and take pictures of the landscape. But if there are stones around — especially the pleasingly round, burnished-by-the-sea ones — I find myself stacking them up.
There are endless games you can play solo or with others: How high can you make your stack? How many colors can you use? What kind of multi-rock sculptures can you make? If it feels like art, that's because it is art — numerous rock-stackers have become Internet-famous over the last few years for their skill in unlikely, or unusual projects. But now everyone is doing the stone-stacking thing, and it's not as harmless as it seems. You're now confusing that with personal statements that really mean nothing.
Stacked rocks in the shape of cairns have long been used as path-indicators, but when it's done for fun, it can confuse other hikers, causing them to veer off the trail.
The official uses of rock stacking are memorials or landmarks. Cairns have been used since the beginning of humanity, mostly to set marks to not get lost in nature. Later, cairns were used as burial monuments and as landmarks to locate buried items.
In Aruba, many people think the meaning behind stacking rocks is that you can make a wish. Rock stacking is something that we strongly advise against.
We ask you not to stack stones all over the island. A landscape full of piles of stones is just not what nature should look like.
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