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Spent 3 hours fixing a trail marker that pointed the wrong way
Walked past this one cairn on the Cascade Loop near Stevens Pass three times before I realized someone stacked it backward, pointing hikers off the ridge. Took a whole afternoon to rebuild it right with proper rock placement. Anyone else notice how often trail markers get messed up by people who don't know what they're doing?
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robinp892d agoTop Commenter
Ended up finding 4 more cairns on the same loop that were just random rock piles with zero directional logic. Pro tip: if it ain't obviously pointing down the trail or marked with paint, scatter that pile before someone follows it off a cliff.
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aaron8802d ago
A buddy of mine once followed a cairn down a cliff east of Snoqualmie and broke his ankle.
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simonk982d ago
That's a fair point but I see it a bit different. I've hiked a ton of trails where cairns are genuinely needed, especially above treeline where the trail just disappears in fog or snow. The problem isn't cairns themselves, it's people building random ones that don't follow any logical path. I've found that most official trail associations use painted rock stacks or obvious directional markers on established routes. If someone breaks an ankle following one, that sounds more like a bad decision to go off trail than the cairn's fault. I'd say learn to read the terrain and know which cairns are legit instead of just scattering every stack you see.
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