An art form?… wow.
So I went backpacking with a friend of mine through Point Reyes national seashore Wednesday to Thursday. Neither of us were really experts, but it was safe to say that we picked the perfect trail for our skill level.
It was a six mile hike starting at the trail head, and ending at the shore. On the way in, the incline was slow and steady. There really weren’t any obstacles to speak of… outside of the fact that the last mile of the hike in was probably at a 30 degree pitch, downward. This made for an interesting start to the hike back in the morning…
Anyway, when we finally rested up, took off our shoes, and headed down to the beach… we ran into these piles of rocks that were stacked one on top of the other. According to the backpackers that had been there a while, the rocks had been there for three or four days at the least. I thought that was a bit strange for a stack of weirdly shaped rocks… but…
…what I had found there on the shore was actually a fairly small example of an art form called Rockbalance. (For obvious reasons.) To my surprise, there were whole Flickr groups, web forums, and clubs associated with it.
Check out some of the photos uploaded on Flickr. A lot of them are really intricate works, and look impossibly time consuming.