5/23/2025 Two CairnsSometimes you need a break from work. Strangely, I often find that when I am taking a break from work , I end up doing exactly what I do for work- playing with stones. Anuhea and I took a bit of time off from paid work to join in a challenge with our friend and fellow waller Dario. The goal was to assemble a cairn from pieces of quartz found on his property. Quartz is a very unforgiving medium, slippery stuff that shifts when you look away from a stone you thought was set. To make it more of a challenge, we were attempting to build it without any stone shaping. No hammers and chisels, please. Working quickly by eye, we paired a few perfect placements with an equal number of compromises. The plan shifted to a flat top as we ran out of quartz as we neared the end, and a boulder crowned it nicely. We also ended up compromising on the hammers and chisels as the stone supply dwindled, converting larger stones into stones that were a more appropriate size for top. It was a lovely challenge, and a good break from linear walls. Below is a cairn from earlier this spring, built in a couple of hours at our local co-op. The previous one was falling apart, so I decided to try a different sort of challenge- a herringbone cairn. For each course, I stood the stones up vertically, spaced apart a finger or two in width, and then gleefully knocked them into place like a circle of dominos. It should hold up for a while. Comments are closed.
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