That point about cairns "leading people off course" really hits home. I've seen piles of rocks that just mark someone's lunch spot, not the actual trail. Do you think there's a difference between these random stacks and the official, maintained cairns that park services sometimes build?

Consider how often you'll face a similar problem without a team to bail you out. If you always lean on others, you never build the mental map to fix things from scratch. That missed router config lesson means next time, you're just waiting for help, making the whole team slower. Pushing through alone builds the kind of skill that lets you handle the next outage without breaking a sweat.