How New Orleans’ 504 Rocks group hides painted rocks | Entertainment/Life

Marie Gauthe-Joseph drives around with a large plastic box full of rocks in the trunk of her car. And in her purse.

She has delicately painted each rock with a variety of designs — quirky pets, mermaids, colorful faces, hearts, cartoonish insects, flowers, and whimsical birds with giant eyes.

Left here and there in the course of an ordinary day, when she’s going to the grocery store, or to a doctor’s visit, or just during a work break around Sola Salon Studios in Metairie, where she’s a hairstylist. She leaves them at ATMs, or curbsides in strip-mall parking lots. Obvious, maybe, but it depends on someone being curious enough to pick it up — or present enough to even notice.

“I drop a rock everywhere I go,” she said.

In a week, Gauthe-Joseph leaves 20 to 30 of them, and in the last four years, she estimates that she’s strategically dropped more than 1,000.

She oversees 504 Rocks, a popular Facebook group with over several thousand active members, as well as newcomers who check in to happily report finding one in the wild, responding to a cryptic sticker on the back that reads “504 Rocks, Keep or Hide.” Depending on the creator, it may include a QR code to the page.

“I love that people are actually following instructions and posting them,” Gauthe-Joseph said. The people who see them, and do reach out, “have no idea who I am, and it just tickles me.”

Like a swift-handed Easter Bunny, she rarely gets caught slipping a specially designed rock into a friend’s purse when they aren’t looking.

For millennia, humans have painted on rocks. But in the past decade, ‘“kindness rocks” have become a global trend, making virtual communities for those who hide and those who seek. People discover, post and even pick up paintbrushes to add their own. There are several groups like 504 Rocks in Louisiana, including New Orleans Rocks, Slidell Painted Rocks, Jefferson Parish Rocks and a local statewide branch of the national Kindness Rocks Project.

That sense of reach appealed to Gauthe-Joseph. Once she saw that there were kindness rocks pages everywhere, “I was hooked.”

They’re meant to pique curiosity, brighten a day. Gauthe-Joseph, 55, says it’s also her therapeutic self-care routine.

But is there a bigger reason she does it? (Does there have to be?)

Last year, one woman found a 504 Rock in Lafreniere Park and posted this comment to the page: “You have no idea what I’ve been going through, and finding this rock made me feel like things were going to be OK.”

That right there could be reason enough.

Story of the traveling rocks

The first rock she left was inside of Target. Minutes later, walking out, she noticed her rock was gone. A woman had already posted about finding it: a picture of a small boy in his car seat holding his new Snoopy character treasure, that Gauthe-Joseph’s wife Reese had painted. Since then, Gauthe-Jospeh has geared her art style toward kids.

“Of course, that experience made me paint a gazillion more rocks,” she said. She will even carry some specifically for kids and friends who need a smile. “If there’s ever a kid screaming or crying at the salon, I will bring them a surprise and they love it.”

The rocks travel far and near, and people come to the page to show off their finds. One poster had coordinates in Paris (France, not Texas). Gauthe-Joseph doesn’t know how it got that far, except that she does place rocks — at least 10 or so — whenever she’s at the airport.

A local couple found two of her crow-themed rocks and has since taken them on road trips across the country, with new updates on their whereabouts at least once a week.

Erica Tome said she found a rainbow-and-white 504 Rock under a tree outside her Uptown house in New Orleans, a few weeks before her wedding day.

“Sometimes the magic happens when you stop worrying,” it said in colorful lettering, and she believed the rock was meant to find her. It inspired her to put aside the anxieties about the wedding.

Tome has no clue who left it. Gauthe-Joseph says it wasn’t hers.

This wasn’t the first 504 Rock Tome’s seen. New rocks appear under the same hot spot by a tree outside her house nearly every week. She and her neighbor have discussed it, and neither have ever seen the person hiding them.

In the beginning, the designs were simple hearts. But recently, one featured a riddle; a chicken, a marijuana leaf and the number pi — chicken pot pie. So is it the same artist behind it all? Having been gifted several rocks, Tome said she is ready to redistribute some of her collection to the French Quarter and not keep them all.

“They’re meant to be shared,” she said. “Whoever paints them has a good heart.”

She will point out the rocks on the ground to kids and passersby in the neighborhood.

“We all need little pushes,” Tome said. “Little love pushes.”

Finding the rock

Gauthe-Jospeh’s hobby began near a creek, but she quickly realized that she probably shouldn’t steal all the rocks nature had to offer. So she got the idea to make a rock by hand, using silicon molds and Cement All solution, lacquering them in a shiny coat. She also buys rocks from a landscaping outlet.

With “Golden Girls” reruns on in the background, she spreads rocks out on the kitchen table in the mornings, and her wife may help with a couple.

“I love things that don’t make sense, like flowers with faces. Whimsical and different. Abstract,” she said. “I keep it random and funny looking.”

But Gauthe-Johnson wasn’t the first person to hide a 504 Rock.

That distinction goes to the group’s founder, Karen Schaueilk, who started 504 Rocks in 2022 after being inspired by another kindness rock enthusiast who created Jefferson Parish Rocks. Schaueilk has since stepped down as administrator and handed the group over to Gauthe-Joseph after noticing her impressive dedication to the craft of hiding rocks.

But she warned Gauthe-Joseph not to burn out, for it was easy to devote all her time to it.

“All I did was eat, sleep and drink rocks, you know, and it was really hard by myself,” Schaueilk said.

She hasn’t stopped making them, leaving them. “It means a lot to me. It really, it was hard to give it up. It’s my baby.” She paints 504 Rocks with acrylic pens in her laundry room next to a window she loves, many days of the week.

Her rocks are in parks, neighborhood shrubs, the post office, elementary school areas, outside hospitals, and “every restaurant I’ve ever been to,” Schaueilk said. (Once, she painted a Christmas igloo rock and hid it in a Robert’s grocery store freezer case.)

The rocks brought her new friends and even some recognition: ‘Yesterday I got my toes done, and I got asked, ‘You’re the rock lady, aren’t you?’”

Though Gauthe-Joseph has hidden thousands of rocks, she has only ever found one herself. On a usual rock drop to Total Wine, she noticed a rock that was not hers. (Quick double take.) It was a 504 Rock from a different member.

“I started jumping up and down. I looked around to make sure no one was looking at me.”