For some visitors, the stones are art and play. For park stewards, they’re rock graffiti that can damage a fragile landscape.
Aug 10, 2026
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Geddy’s.
ACADIA NATIONAL PARK—In one of the recent posts about the stacks of rock on the area between Bar Harbor and Bar Island, a Bar Harbor resident said, “Wow, Someone was busy creating on Bar Island! I really enjoyed walking around this sculpture garden! The work reminded me of the well known landscape artist Andy Goldsworthy.”
Some rocks were piled on top of each other.
Others formed hearts and fairy circles.
Others balanced against each other like a small bridge for water gnomes.
Another post by Bar Harbor Town Council Vice Chair Earl Brechlin showed the extent of the rock stacks, one after another after another, many above high-water mark.
“Bar Island today. This is why we can’t have nice things,” he wrote.
The sand bar or land bridge from downtown Bar Harbor is often underwater, exposed during the time around low tide. It’s comprised of pebbles, sand, gravel, and rocks.
It’s mostly those rocks that are being hefted, hauled, and stacked onto each other above the high-water mark on Acadia National Park’s Bar Island.
According to a trail steward from Friends of Acadia, stewards dismantled between 100-150 rock stacks above high-tide mark at Bar Island, Sunday, August 9.
“Friends of Acadia Summit Stewards support Acadia National Park rangers by dismantling misleading rock stacks throughout Acadia to protect trail integrity and for visitor safety,” FOA Perrin Doniger, vice president of communications and marketing, said in an email Sunday.
On Sunday, close to low tide, as one Friends of Acadia steward was dismantling what the park refers to as rock graffiti, visitors and families—mostly children—were building more.
Rock stacking occurs in other parts of the park. It also occurred along Bar Harbor’s Shore Path recently, which is not Acadia National Park property.
“Last year (2025), Friends of Acadia’s Summit Stewards dismantled 867 misleading rock stacks and repaired 822 cairns that mark safe hiking routes throughout Acadia,” Doniger said.
Rock stacks and another structure are art to some, places and intersections of wonder—or a moment for kids to build and focus on putting one stone on top of another—but as Impact on Acadia writes, “Acadia is a nationally protected park that welcomes visitors. Visitors are asked to follow the ‘leave no trace’ rule. Many people have been disregarding this rule. Cairns are constructed along the trails of Acadia, there to mark travel routes, but people have also begun to create these cairns all over the park. Although they may seem like an innocent sculpture, these rock piles are another form of graffiti. When you create them on hiking trails, people can mistake a visitor-made cairn for a cairn marker made by the trail crew. This can lead people on the wrong path, which is very dangerous.
”Cairns also disrupt the natural beauty of the park. Other visitors want to discover the same land as the people before them, and a beach with a steadily growing number of cairns is a different landscape than what the person before saw. Photographers and sightseers can also be affected by cairns, as they clutter the view and often make it dangerous to venture into certain areas.
”A final issue with these cairns is that when they are built in vulnerable places, the removal of rocks from the delicate soil can lead to extreme erosion, and/or uproot and kill plants, as well as affect organisms living in the soil. Everything is connected, and so disturbing just one small ecosystem can hurt a much wider audience.”
According to one of the trail stewards on Sunday, teaching people the difference between rock stacks and the park’s purposefully created trail markers such as the Bates cairns is part of their work.
“It’s what we do on the daily,” she said.
Recently, at Bar Island, there was a rock fort made out of smaller rock stacks.
“That was kind of a surprise to us,” she said.
When it comes to stewardship, the area is a bit tricky. Bar Island belongs to Acadia National Park (the National Park Service) to mean low water, which is halfway across the bar to the Gouldsboro town line. In Maine, “mean low water” basically means to the point where the land meets another property line or 1,650 feet (100 rods) out to sea. Other points on the land bridge’s access are in Bar Harbor.
On Sunday afternoon, during low tide, a plethora of activities occurred on the land bar connecting Bar Harbor to the island. One woman appeared to be absconding with a grocery bag of stones, barely hefting it as she navigated through the people visiting. Nearby, a family had lunch. People took photos, selfies, waded in the water, or investigated the tide pools.
Some kids and adults helped the Friends of Acadia volunteers dismantle the stacks, heading over to other rock stacks and slowly heaving one stone off another.
“I don’t know where it belongs,” one boy said after he hauled a rock off the stack and placed it by the high water line, marked by algae.
Rock stacks, particularly on mountains, can cause confusion among hikers. The volunteers at Friends of Acadia have been primarily focused on Acadia’s mountains when it comes to trail stewardship.
“This is an important part of the Summit Stewards’ work this summer as well,” Doniger said. “The Summit Stewards also actively work to educate park visitors about Leave No Trace principles, including why building rock stacks can be harmful. These rock stacks can confuse hikers and damage fragile environments.”
On Sunday, one volunteer was stationed at the head of the trails of Bar Island, explaining why the stacks can hurt the environment and also giving out junior ranger information.
According to a 2018 The New Yorker article by Sophie Haigney, “In Acadia National Park, volunteers destroyed nearly thirty-five hundred rock stacks, on two mountains alone, in 2016 and 2017.”
“I would probably equate the rock-stacking phenomenon with the painted-rock phenomenon, in how it’s driven by social media,” Christie Anastasia, the then public-affairs specialist at Acadia, told the New Yorker.
“Painted rocks are a kind of social-media treasure hunt; people leave brightly decorated rocks in parks, with their social-media handles noted on the undersides. The person who finds the rock can then send a message to the person who left it,” the article continues. “Acadia park employees have collected hundreds of them during the past year. The painted rocks now sit in a purgatory of bins, while the park staff figures out what to do with them.”
Requests to the National Park Service for comment were not returned or acknowledged at press time. We’ll update the story if we hear from them.
Unless otherwise specified photos: Shaun Farrar/Carrie Jones/Bar Harbor Story
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
How you can volunteer with the drop-in stewardship program.
FOA’s statement about why it cares about the cairns.
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