If you're hiking along a trail in a national park and you see a rock pile, don't touch it: Cairns are often directional tools set up for hikers. Skipping the US Travel 2025 🌴 This country's ...

"The rock cairns at national parks like El Malpais, Hawai'i Volcanoes, and Acadia are carefully maintained by park staff to keep hikers like you on the correct path," it states.

Cairns. Those piles of balanced rocks on a trail or in a field. Sometimes they serve a purpose. Most times they're just there. Now some say it's time to kick cairns. Literally.

“When used appropriately, rock cairns are great for navigation, safety, and delineating a new or hard-to-follow trail,” ...

A field of cairns has been created along the Lower Yosemite Falls Trail. Yosemite National Park said rock-stacking should be left to rangers and trail workers. (Marc Martin / Los Angeles Times) ...

Yosemite National Park wants visitors to stop building large rock towers, called cairns, and dismantle any they find. Here’s why.

According to Yosemite National Park officials, stacking rocks is "distracting in a wilderness setting. Building rock cairns also disturbs small insects, reptiles, and microorganisms that call the ...

“In the American Southwest, it’s unclear exactly when rock cairns began to be used to mark trails. Evidence suggests that Native American tribes used stacks of rocks to mark burial sites and ...

A rock cairn marks a spot along the Hidden Valley Trail in Ogden. (Photo: Robert Williamson) It starts heading south, off Indian Trail, along the foothills and through sage brush and stubby maple ...

If you're hiking along a trail in a national park and you see a rock pile, don't touch it: Cairns are often directional tools set up for hikers.

Not every rock tower — or cairn — is bad, however. “When used appropriately, rock cairns are great for navigation, safety, and delineating a new or hard-to-follow trail,” officials at ...

Yosemite National Park wants visitors to stop building large rock towers, called cairns, and dismantle any they find. Here’s why.