If You Are Visiting the Smoky Mountains This Summer, Please Stop Stacking Rocks

This Is a Good Reminder for All of Us

I will be honest with you. I knew this was a trend and two years ago I was in the mountains and did the exact same thing for the photo opportunity. So I am not here to judge anyone because I get it. Rock stacking, or cairn building as some people call it, has become one of those things you see all over social media where people visiting parks and nature areas stack rocks on top of each other as a way of saying “I was here.” It looks cool, it feels like your own little Neil Armstrong moment, and it seems completely harmless. But Great Smoky Mountains National Park is now asking visitors to stop, and once you hear why, you are going to agree with them completely.

Deniz Altindas

Here Is What Happened

An Eastern Hellbender was found crushed beneath a stacked rock in one of the park’s streams. If you are not familiar with the Eastern Hellbender, it is a giant aquatic salamander that is actually pretty incredible and also increasingly rare. They live under rocks in clean, flowing streams, and here is the part that really gets me. A single Eastern Hellbender can lay anywhere between 100 and 300 eggs under one rock at a time.

That means that when someone moves a rock to stack it for a photo, they could be wiping out an entire generation of a species in a single moment without even knowing it.

It Is Bigger Than Just One Animal

The Eastern Hellbender is not the only one affected by this, either. Streams in places like the Smoky Mountains are home to entire ecosystems living underneath those rocks. Insects, larvae, fish eggs, and all kinds of wildlife depend on those rocks staying exactly where they are. When we move them, even with the best intentions, we disrupt something that took nature a very long time to build.

Great Smoky Mountains National Park is one of the most biodiverse places in the entire world. It is home to more tree species than all of northern Europe combined and hundreds of species of wildlife that exist nowhere else. That is not something to take lightly.

Wes Hicks

What You Can Do Instead

If you are heading to the Smoky Mountains this summer, you should. You should join me in visiting , because it is absolutely beautiful. Just leave the rocks where you find them. Take your photos, enjoy the streams, and let the wildlife do its thing undisturbed. The best souvenir you can take home from a place like that is the memory of seeing it exactly as nature intended, and if you're like me, maybe you take some Polaroid photos and have those too.

And if you see someone stacking rocks in a stream, it is okay to say something. Most people genuinely do not know the damage they could be causing, sure as heck didn’t, and a heads-up goes a long way.

The Smoky Mountains have been around a lot longer than any of us, and with a little bit of awareness, we can make sure they stay that way for a long time to come. 🏔️

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