Southern Stacked Stones ~ Rachel Rayner

Tuesday, 20 May 2014

Southern Stacked Stones

Posted by Rachel | 20:13 | Easter 2014, Holidays, Minutiae, Pictures or it didn't happen

In the South Island, we saw stacked stones.

First we saw them by Aoraki.

A picture of a cairn of staked rocks in front of Aoraki/Mt Cook in New Zealand's South Island.

Then by Lake Tekapo.

Stacked stones by Lake Tekapo. That's the Church of the Good Shepard in the background.

Stacked stones by Lake Tekapo, in the South Island of New Zealand.

Is this a cairn thing? Do they mark the dead, or do the living place the stones to mark the days?

There are so many of them.

"What the hell," I said. "What the hell is going on with everyone on this entire island that's driving them to compulsively stack rocks?"

Jesse standing next to a pile of stacked stones by Lake Tekapo, in the South Island of New Zealand.

"Don't be all weird about this," said Jesse, adding scale to my photos.

"It would have been that first one guy stacked some rocks, and then someone else stacked some rocks, and then it was a thing."

A pile of stacked stones by Lake Tekapo, in the South Island of New Zealand.

They weren't all by the shore: someone would have had to waded to do this:

A pile of stacked stones in Lake Tekapo, in the South Island of New Zealand.

We saw them further South, in Queenstown...

The shores of Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown, South Island.

Stacked stones on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, Queenstown, South Island.

We saw them on the shores of Te Anau, supplemented with wood. I tried to stack stones at Lake Te Anau, but the rocks slipped and fell, and I was too cross with them to take a picture.

We saw a variation in Glenorchy.

Stacked bricks on the foundations of an old building, Glenorchy, in New Zealand's South Island.

This was the hotel which burned down in 1959. We know that because at some point, the powers that be in Glenorchy halted the clean up and put up a sign instead. It's right on the main street.