When in the Alps.. Cairns are awesome! - Smartphone photography Saturday

What's a cairn?

You just might ask..

If you've been travelling around the world you might have seen these small piles where stones are balanced on top of each other to create a tower like structure. Most often these days the piles appear in the mountains or at popular natural tourist attractions where they are usually erected for the joy of taking pictures and as a marker that "yeah I've been here".
These piles are known as "cairns" and are actually ageold structures, used from anything from marking graves to act as guiding landmarks for wanderes not to get lost. Having hiked a fair share myself throughout Europe in my earlier days I have on a few occasions used cairns myself to not get lost and they can actually be rather invaluable when walking forests and mountains. These days however, I must admit my cairns, and the ones I encounter, is more of the "look at me I was here" kind of type. It has been a habit for a while now together with @iwanderela, to erect a small cairn whenever we reach a new site on our travels both for the mandatory photos but also to leave our tiny footprint wherever we go - as the saying says "take only pictures, leave nothing but footprints".

Lately, however, this behaviour seems to be a problems some places in the world where natural areas are completely robbed of pebbles and small rocks for these tourist cairns, making the soil underneath vulnerable to eroding away and taking away important places for small animals to seek shelter or find food, it's so bad that rangers and conservationists alike, goes out to tell people to stop making cairns just for the fun of it. (one amoung many sources)

The picture below is from Easter last year where I went hiking in the alps together with my father somewhere in the northern part of Italy. We wanted to have a change of scenery from the complete and utter flatness of Denmark so we went down south to look at some huge ass mountains somewhere in between the pizza munching Italians and the beer brewing Germans. While on a smaller hike we followed the trail to a viewpoint until the trail divided in to two smaller paths that both looked like noone had been around for a while. We are both really out of shape, ema dn my father, and we were getting a bit tired at this time, honestly just wanting to sit our soft butts down on a nice piece of wood made just for that occasion, so with a huge sigh we decided on the right path and with heavy steps we went on our way. Great was our out of breath cheering as we cleared some trees and saw the salvation of the view point with at least a few comfortable benches in front of us.
To be honest, we hadn't walked that far from the fork and since I know how much @iwanderela loves pictures of cairns and that it could maybe serve a purpose of showing other hikers the way I build this little fella shown below. Hope you enjoy the picture, captured on my Sony Xperia z3 as much as I did making and taking it.

My small cairn in the Italian Alps

Category	Smartphonephotography
Settings	Auto
Camera	Sony Xperia Z3
Location	The Alps - Somewhere in Northern Italy

Enjoy your Saturday steemians, catch you next time

The Wandering Danish