TARGET 101117

A Rocky Balancing Act

This didn't happen naturally.

For centuries, "cairns", or stacks of rocks have served as road markers, grave markers, property boundary markers and signal markers for troops, travelers, and worshipers seeking holy places and the very tops of high mountains.

If you've been to Alamogordo for training, and stayed to go gemstone hunting later in Oro Grande, you've seen the very practical small cairns built along the rugged dirt roads to warn people of upcoming road washouts where your car can fall over a dropoff, and around the vertical mine shafts where unwarned people could fall in and die.

Like so many things humans do, the practical activity can spawn an art form. The simple (actually, not simple at all) act of stacking one rock on top of another has entered our culture as an art.

A very heavy, muscle-building art.

Care is required - and steel toed shoes.

No matter the reason people get into this art, stone stacking or balancing is simply amazing, just for the fact that the results seem to defy all logic and probably even physics.

This is art?

There is no dowsing map for this target, since you will find stacked rocks - and people stacking rocks - everywhere. These modern-day cairns are basically where you find them.

Someone started this cairn many feet below the water, planting the first stone firmly on the river bed, and continuing upwards to the majestic stack you see here. It is so delicately but firmly balanced that it stands up the the swift river current, even during flood times.

To learn more about Cairns and the art of rock balancing, take a look at the following web sites:

Wikipedia (Rock balancing)
Wikipedia (Cairns)
Oddity Central