June, 2016 Larrabee State Park
Edge of the Salish Sea
I am sure that many bucketeers and other readers have heard of Casey Nocket, the woman who, a couple of years ago systematically defaced numerous natural features in our national parks throughout the west. Fortunately, she publicized her escapade online and was caught.
According to her Instagram feed, Nocket has been traveling quite extensively – she has photos tagged from all over the West, including stops in Carrizo Plain National Monument, Sequoia, Bryce, Zion, Grand Staircase-Escalante, Grand Canyon, Canyonlands, Rocky Mountain and Joshua Tree National Parks …
When brought to justice, among other things, the court required Ms. Nocket to devote 200 hours of community service cleaning up in those same parks and then banned her from National Park Land. She will also have to pay some as yet to be determined monetary restitution .
Most descraters of public property are not caught and the cleanup is left to the public works folks, park rangers, or to volunteer citizens. That what this bucket is about – the cleanup by local citizens of a graffiti-defiled State Park.
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Clayton Beach:
Although not of the same magnitude as Ms. Nocket’s work, we in Whatcom County, WA have ongoing tagging of our natural playgrounds as is well illustrated in the title image. This particular example is from Clayton Beach, part of Larrabee State Park where the sandstone of Chuckanut Mountain meets the Salish Sea.
Clayton Beach is very popular with locals of all ages, especially at low tides as one can walk out into meadows of eel grass that are home to all sorts of sea critters, particularly Dungeness crabs, numerous species of bivalves, sand dollars, and sea anemones in the sand and clinging by the thousands to rocks. Eel grass meadows are also where young salmon and other fish hang out as they mature and prepare for subsequent voyages.
This is also a favorite beach for the dogs to chase and retrieve sticks and balls thrown into the water.
Chuckanut Mt. has an interesting geologic history of its own as part of the larger Chuckanut Formation. I previously described the origins of this huge sandstone rock formation that remains a treasure trove of fossils of ancient flora (here) and fauna (here) from long past (eocene) and I will feature its sandstone shores in part 2 of this bucket.
On June 18th, the local paper headlined the vandalism at Clayton Beach, illustrating the tagging shown above. The next day my son, his dog Heidi, and I went to see the damage. The ¾ mile trail from Chuckanut drive to the beach itself is verdantly treed and shrubbed with salmon berry, black berry, Sword ferns, birch, madrona, cedar, fir and other greenery. In the overhead canopy we hear numerous unseen bird calls, with eagles’ whistles as we approach the water.
The cleanup
The park service initially estimated and reported in the paper that it would take about $15,000 to have the graffiti cleaned up and therefore sought community volunteers. We were asked to bring gloves and a bucket and meet at the trail head at noon on Saturday. The cleanup later was estimated to be only $5,000 but still, given the way State services including parks have been slashed in recent years, this was a lot of money, so they stayed with the volunteers.
And volunteer they did. At one point I counted seventy Bellinghamsters (as we call ourselves), but others came and went throughout the afternoon so this is a minimum number that volunteered. A Seattle TV station that covered the cleanup estimated 100 volunteers. As it turned out half that number would have been plenty but it was great to see so many give up a beautiful Saturday afternoon to hand scrub spray painted rocks. Of course the setting was smashing.
The cleanup procedure was fairly straight forward. The most basic method for scrubbing the graffiti was to make a slurry of sand and water in the bucket and rub the paint off the rocks. That actually worked quite well for the black and the white paint. However, the red and orange colors were much more resistant. Scrubbing the colors required wire brushes and for some, wire scrubbers on power tools was required.
The photos below are illustrative of the volunteers and the progress they made. Where you see wet spots is where the graffiti has been scrubbed and not yet dry.
With all the help, what was scheduled for a four hour session took about 2.5 hours.
Does anyone have any ideas or experience in preventing or deterring such vandalism on public properties? If so, please share.
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