Shoutout to the guy who told me to ditch the paper map and just follow the cairns on the Tuckerman Ravine trail

Got completely fogged in above tree line last Saturday and the cairns saved me from wandering off a cliff, but some purists say that's lazy navigation and ruins the route finding skill, what's your take on relying on trail markers versus reading a map in bad conditions?

3 comments

3 Comments

parker_thomas1mo ago

Aren't the cairns actually part of the trail markers you'd use with a map anyway?

sage_dixon1mo ago

Three cairns I saw last week were just piles of rocks near a dead end. Not trail markers, just some bored kid stacking stones. Good luck following that with a map.

parker_thomas29d ago

Man, that's rough getting fogged in up there. I've been in similar soup on the Franconia Ridge and those cairns were basically the only thing keeping me from taking a wrong step into a ravine. Isn't it better to use every tool you've got rather than end up as a search and rescue statistic? Map skills are great and all, but when you can't see ten feet past your nose, a pile of rocks is about as good as it gets.