Whoever’s gone out hiking will have seen cairns: stacks of stones to mark a trail. I love the way they look and the function they have. People seem to also make cairns for fun. While it can be fun to create, personally I wouldn’t do that. You never know if you send someone astray by placing a random mark along a trail or by taking away from an existing purposefully placed cairn. The only place I added to a cairn was at a place along the Vasaloppsleden trail in Sweden (Bordet). It’s kind of a thing to add a stone there, for good travels or something like that (I don’t remember exactly).
I love how the use of stones and stacks of stones to mark a route or trail is such an old practice. They did it in prehistory and we still do it today. People are quite the habitual creatures, aren’t they?
Alive and Trekking 
I love seeing travellers’ stones. They’re a nice monument to those who’ve gone before.
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And it makes you imagine the adventures they’ve been on! 😉
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I’ve read one day that creating this cairns a bit everywhere (and especially in Iceland) can be detrimental to the environnement. But I agree, it’s quite eye catching, love them as well.
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Makes sense. After all, you never know if you speed up erosion by removing rocks. I can imagine that in a country like Iceland, with such a barren and exposed landscape, this is especially the case. I read that in Norway, they register cairns along trails and that erecting your own ‘for fun’ is forbidden.
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