From 2018: Carefully balanced rock towers make a pretty picture, but the proliferation of cairns, fuelled by social media, has negative consequences for the environment.
The photograph in the Facebook post is pretty: piles of red rocks balanced at the edge of a cliff, suggesting a miniature mirror of the jagged rock face opposite. The stacks look like small shrines to mountain solitude, carefully balanced at the edge of a precipice. But when Zion National Park, in September, the social-media coördinators for the park included a plea: “Please, enjoy the park but leave rocks and all natural objects in place.
The posts found within the #RockStacks and #StoneStacking hashtags on Instagram range from amateurish to seriously impressive . It is common for multiple stacks to appear in a single picture; they look like chimneys or gravestones or maybe the ruins of a lost civilization. Inspired by social-media posts, new rock stackers are taking up the hobby, and the piles of stones are proliferating along with the pictures of them.
It’s easy to see a frustrated stone stacker’s point of view: it’s a meditative and creative activity; the impacts of a single stone stack are probably negligible compared with, say, driving; and it’s a means of spending time outdoors that seems to run counter to the spirit of social media in its emphasis on concentration, slow movements, and communing with the natural world. The calamity of the stone stack, in our anxious times, seems admittedly minor.
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