Cairn - Modern Cairns

Modern Cairns

Today, cairns are built for many purposes. The most common use in North America and Northern Europe is to mark mountain bike and hiking trails and other cross-country trail blazing, especially in mountain regions at or above the tree line. For example, the extensive trail network maintained by the DNT, the Norwegian Trekking Association, extensively uses cairns in conjunction with T-painted rock faces to mark trails. Other examples of these can be seen in the lava fields of Volcanoes National Park in Hawaiʻi to mark several hikes. Placed at regular intervals, a series of cairns can be used to indicate a path across stony or barren terrain, even across glaciers. Such cairns are often placed at junctions or in places where the trail direction is not obvious, and may also be used to indicate an obscured danger, such as a sudden drop, or a noteworthy point such as the summit of a mountain. Most trail cairns are small, a foot or less in height, but may be built taller so as to protrude through a layer of snow. Hikers passing by often add a stone, as a small bit of maintenance to counteract the erosive effects of severe weather. North American trail marks are sometimes called "ducks" or "duckies", because they sometimes have a "beak" pointing in the direction of the route. The expression "two rocks do not make a duck" reminds hikers that just one rock resting upon another could be the result of accident or nature rather than intentional trail marking.

Coastal cairns, or "sea marks", are also common in the northern latitudes, especially in the island-strewn waters of Scandinavia and eastern Canada. Often indicated on navigation charts, they may be painted white or lit as beacons for greater visibility offshore.

Modern cairns may also be erected for historical or memorial commemoration or simply for decorative or artistic reasons. One example is a series of many cairns marking British soldiers' mass graves at the site of the Battle of Isandlwana, South Africa. Another is the Matthew Flinders Cairn on the side of Arthur's Seat, a small mountain on the shores of Port Phillip Bay, Australia. A large cairn, commonly referred to as "the igloo" by the locals, was built atop a hill next to the I-476 highway in Radnor, Pennsylvania and is a part of a series of large rock sculptures initiated in 1988 to symbolize the township's Welsh heritage and to beautify the visual imagery along the highway. Some are merely places where farmers have collected stones removed from a field. These can be seen in the Catskill Mountains, North America where there is a strong Scottish heritage, and may also represent places where livestock were lost. In locales exhibiting fantastic rock formations, such as the Grand Canyon, tourists often construct simple cairns in reverence of the larger counterparts.. By contrast, cairns may have a strong aesthetic purpose, for example in the art of Andy Goldsworthy.