Our occasional memo stones from mountains

They keep us close with mountains.........

When we are doing our trip through mountains we can find something interesting and take it as "a souvenir". It can be, e.g. a bird's feather, a fallen leaf or flower of plant having original shape or colour, or even a dried up piece of plant as a whole if it is small enough. However, most often this "souvenir" is a stone, the symbol of mountains. Such collected stones have various shape, colour and are of different origin.
However, if we read comments attached to this album there appear some questions. What may we do in mountains? All the members of SP know that mountains are very fragile ecosystems. The best behaviour there is to leave only footprints. I am a single trekker, all which I need in mountains I have in my backpack. During my 10-14-days activity in mountains I do not leave there nothing more than any animal. All 21 stones presented in album were sampled since 1958 up today, that means 0.42 stone per year. This is a way telling you how to collect anything in mountains. No stone is from summits, no stone is from steep and quickly eroded slopes, no stone is from the protected areas like natural reserves, national parks, etc. Most often my stones were taken at the bottoms of mountains, from quarries, from trails made by man or were selected from denudated rocky mass. Looking at the huge industrial "achievements" of people in mountains in form of bridges, railways, devastated slopes for skiing, huge hotels, energetic lines, I am, as a real biologist, very conscious of the specific nature of mountains. For example "Memo stone 7" is a piece of 3x4 cm dimensions which in tousands lay on a touristic trail and taking it no destruction was made there. I think that a piece of rock really small taken from mountains will be a sign of our desire to be there all the time and can also improve our knowledge on mountains, their morphology, mineralogy and origin. I hope that SP members are not "weekend tourists" and all know very well how to be in mountains properly.
This album comprises pictures of stones which I sampled occasionally in mountains. The first ones were three small pieces of a black fragile slate which I found in Puncowka Stream near Cieszyn city in Beskidy Mts., S Poland. I carved them as a boy in 1958.
Probably you also gathered stones for your memo and for such your pictures this album is open.
Welcome, but remember that mountains need to be protected first of all!!!!!!!

Images

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