Grab your bear can or camp chair, kick your feet up and chew the fat about anything Sierra Nevada related that doesn't quite fit in any of the other forums. Within reason, (and the HST rules and guidelines) this is also an anything goes forum. Tell stories, discuss wilderness issues, music, or whatever else the High Sierra stirs up in your mind.
To me the ego cairns are like trash or graffiti. They don't harm the environment, just my experience of it. They are also a metaphor for how many of us interact with the wilderness.
It's not a problem while it's being graffiti, on a rock or a tree trunk or a trail sign. When it washes into a stream or percolates into the soil and eventually the water table then I grant you that it is a pollutant. But in the larger scheme of things, in our increasingly urban world, it just noise. Not a measurable signal at all. The primary insult, the overwhelming effect, is to human perception. Just look at the air.
This is a cair near Baxter Lake. After we came back someone told me there was a warm spring near Baxter. I wonder if this cairs shows the way to the spring.
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