They were there last weekend. I was happy to see useful cairns for once.
Agree. Sterling is excellently blazed, and easy to follow...except up over the power line, which required a few moments of head scratching.
How are you supposed to know if the cairns is a legit one or a random one built by a spiritually inclined hiker?
I mean, context is a big cue. If I look up and see a
line of cairns, I'm going to think, "huh, these must mark out a direction", not, "some dipstick decided to stack rocks up here to stoke their own ego."
I've been hiking/riding trails long enough that I am reflexively looking for blazes or markers as I go along. I'll grant that not everybody will pick that up, nor will new people necessarily be keen on it...but IMO/E? If there are markers/blazes/cairns that suddenly go missing/knocked down? That's the work of 1) the same delinquents that steal stop signs, 2) well meaning Boy Scouts "re blazing", and 3) someone with a stick (or several) up their butt. Usually the ire that gets worked up to remove/disassemble something as heavy as the cairns posted by
@a.s. is from the rock-stacking police.
I'm also willing to stick my neck out and say that--given the terrain of our state/immediate area (foothills, forests), a cairn is not the most immediately recognizable thing. There's a "cairn" built out of sticks/logs in Brisbane, for instance, that I need to [constantly] remind myself is there to mark the trail divergence...simply because so much of the immediate area neither requires that, nor has the requisite materials for a 'proper' cairn.
To be honest in recent years there has been a proliferation of 'rock piles' being placed in random places along trails that serve no purpose other than as a testimonial of the place being blessed by the presence of the builder of said rock pile (as opposed to cairns) or to their 'spirituality'.
Double quote: I don't actually hate the intent behind it, but if it's being done for "spiritual" reasons, then it being easily, if at all, visible shouldn't come into it. A couple of years ago, someone started building a 'fairy village' in Hartshorne, that was only really visible if you were 1) looking right at it, and 2) happened to be there when the sun was going down, with a light. I initially hated it, and the idea that someone would do that...then I took a big swig of "chill the eff out" and realized: some kid (or adult, really doesn't matter though) probably lives in a house that is
literally 50 feet from the trail and is having a bit of fun. How many army men did I lose at the park or the beach when I was a kid? Would I be enraged if I stepped on an army man on the beach? Yeah, probably for all of 2 seconds, then be like, "sweet, free army guy, I'm gonna put it on the desk at home!".
You want to stack rocks, or sticks, or setup miniature battlefields? Go nuts...unless it is literally in the middle of the trail, then FU. I've personally decided that it doesn't really matter to me until someone decides to put in zero effort to their 'vandalism', but what makes the scribbling of a bored Lenape or "settler" more valuable than Timmy and Suzie's scratching on the rock, other than time? I'll cop to adding a rock on top of a pile once or twice, in the moment. No different than signing your name in the geocache book.