Comments on Is it OK to throw pebbles and stones in streams, waterfalls, ponds, etc.?
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Is it OK to throw pebbles and stones in streams, waterfalls, ponds, etc.?
I love the outdoors, but I'm not really an experienced outdoorsman, hiker or camper. I have little to no education in outdoor etiquette, beyond the really obvious stuff (pick up your trash, etc.).
Last week I took my family on a road trip through a mountainous area, and we stopped at several little mountain streams and waterfalls to explore the area and enjoy the view. On many of these trails, my young toddler had a great time picking up dozens of pebbles and small stones from the path and throwing them into the stream / waterfall / pond / etc.
Only later I thought to wonder if there's something wrong with doing that. Were we contributing to erosion, disturbing animal habitats, interfering with water courses, or something? Should I stop him from throwing rocks in the future and educate him about why that's not environmentally conscious, or is it not a problem, so I can let him throw pebbles to his heart's content?
(My personal guess is that driving our car through the area [on public roads] probably did more environmental damage overall than throwing a few pebbles, but, well, I really don't have any education to back that up!)
In addition to the other answers here, I would point out that the trail itself may be maintained using a light applicati …
5y ago
Some places have rocks on the shore that arrive there naturally. The effect of a few dozen people per mile people picki …
5y ago
I used to tell my children not to throw rocks in the ocean because eventually the ocean would get full and the earth wou …
5y ago
Some places are more sensitive than others. It can be hard to tell whether some innocuous-looking pebbles are a critica …
5y ago
Nature is not static, it is always in motion. Let's look at two extremes. A small pothole full of water on the trail …
5y ago
Technically, according to Leave No Trace principles you should leave everything as you find it. Two other related princi …
5y ago
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/q/22488. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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Some places have rocks on the shore that arrive there naturally. The effect of a few dozen people per mile people picking up a rock from random locations uniformly distributed along a moving river would be trivial compared with the motion of rocks in and out of the water from natural causes.
A point that hasn't been mentioned, thouh, is that other places have rocks manually placed on them to help control erosion. The more of these rocks get tossed in the river, the more effort someone will have to spend replacing them.
If people picked up rocks from uniformly-distributed random locations, the overall impact in either case would probably be fairly slight. Unfortunately, areas that have rocks manually added to control erosion tend to be more attractive to people wishing to skip stones than the areas which don't.
This post was sourced from https://outdoors.stackexchange.com/a/22512. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
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