It’s one thing when members of the selfie (variant of “selfish”) generation want to record everything they do on the internet, so it will be there for time and all eternity, but it’s altogether another thing when, for example, a so-called “graffiti artist” vandalizes our national parks.
To recap: Last week, Casey Nocket, 23, who defaced seven national parks in 2014, pleaded guilty to seven misdemeanor counts of damaging government property. A federal court in Fresno, California, banned Nocket from most of America’s public lands for the next two years — prohibiting her from entering lands administered by the National Park Service, U.S. Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, and Army Corps of Engineers. Additionally, Nocket will have to complete 200 hours of community service.
Nocket began her 26-day rock-painting spree in September 2014 at Rocky Mountain National Park, Backpacker.com reported, and would go on to deface six other parks, including Death Valley, Colorado National Monument, Canyonlands, Zion, Yosemite, and Crater Lake. Nocket used permanent acrylic paint, posting her work to Tumblr and Instagram under the handle “Creepyting.” The account has since been deleted.
Nocket’s vandalism came to light in late October, Backpacker.com reported, when blog Modern Hiker put up a post about Nocket with pictures of her paintings, taken from her Instagram account before she made it private. That same day, a Reddit user posted a picture of graffiti that the user had encountered on Yosemite’s Vernal Falls trail. Amateur sleuths connected the picture to Nocket’s social media accounts, and the National Park Service soon took up the investigation.
Jeffrey Olson, a public affairs officer with the National Parks Service, said it was no surprise that it was the public who cried foul.
“People love national parks and 99.999 percent of those who go to national parks enjoy them for what they are,” he said. “They don’t feel a need to leave some kind of enduring legacy of their visit.”
But the small percentage of people who are vandals can leave a great deal of destruction, as Nocket has shown.
Last week, the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources reported that vandals etched crosses on the crumbling remains of the 180-year-old palace of a former Hawaiian king; a site that is closed to the public. It is considered one of Hawaii’s most important cultural sites, and has been defaced many times before.
In 2014, two (now former) Boy Scout leaders toppled ancient (170 million years old) rock formation and boasted about it online. And in 2014, the National Park Service took steps to ban drones from 84 million acres of public lands and waterways, saying the unmanned aircraft annoy visitors, harass wildlife and threaten safety.
Unfortunately, park officials in Utah say that along with increased visits in the last couple of years, vandalism has increased dramatically. Last year, monument patrols restored 1,234 square feet of rock that had been defaced.
“Park rangers spent thousands of hours using wire brushes, spray bottles and even toothbrushes to painstakingly remove painted, scratched and carved images,” Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument spokesman Larry Crutchfield Crutchfield said. “We have seen a doubling in the amount in the past year.” The park has set up a hotline to report damage.
Kudos to the alert people who helped identify Nocket and bring her to justice. And thanks to the 99.999 percent of visitors who don’t feel “a need to leave some kind of enduring legacy of their visit.”
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