At Hanging Lake, vandals once again leave their mark on nature

“Kilroy was here.” While that popular World War II-era graffiti may retain a certain amount of charm, there is nothing charming or appealing about the spray-paint scribblings on rocks and trees leading to Glenwood Canyon’s famed Hanging Lake.

The work of some vandal acting out of egotism or inconsideration or plain idiocy, the word “Blest” was scrawled in numerous places, causing an estimated $3,000 in cleanup costs and prompting District Ranger Aaron Mayville of the U.S. Forest Service to consider closing the popular trail temporarily until summer seasonal staff is in place to police the crowds traipsing up the trail each day.

“This is outrageous,” Mayville said. “People who vandalize and blatantly disregard the rules have no business being on the national forest, and we plan on finding and charging the individual responsible.”

Unfortunately, defacement of natural areas is becoming increasingly common. Remember the 23-year-old woman convicted in federal court of painting on rocks in seven national parks throughout the West, including Rocky Mountain National Park and the Colorado National Monument, and then posted photos on social media in 2014?

Apparently the desire to leave one’s mark on the landscape — proof of presence — is innate in some people.

To satisfy that urge, the Colorado Mountain Club collects summit registers placed at the top of many of the state’s highest and most prominent peaks, although they fill up so quickly on the most popular routes in the summer that often within days the PVC cannisters are crammed with additional signed scraps of paper, gum wrappers and even strips of cloth — so desperate are peak-baggers to show that they made it.

In some ways, social media serves the same purpose, allowing people to broadcast their existence to the world and gain affirmation: I tweet, therefore I am.

(Facebook selfies and even live-feed videos are so ubiquitous from mountaintops that even Mount Everest will soon have free Wi-Fi.)

This kind of documentation at least still adheres to code of the backcountry ethics that visitors should “take only pictures and leave only footprints.”

The problem, of course, is a small minority of cretins who are destructive just for the sake of being destructive, without any regard for the environment or any consideration for others who deserve to see our natural areas without blemish.

The same mentality that would paint the limestone faces of the Hanging Lake trail also would drive four-wheelers off trails and into wetlands and on fragile soils, remove artifacts for personal collection and sale, leave campsites trashed and blast shotgun target practice at signs denoting preserved areas.

In too many instances, our treasured places are being overrun by scofflaws who don’t believe in the rules intended to keep them nice.

Dogs — and their waste — routinely accompany hikers up to Hanging Lake, for instance, and visitors wade or swim into the travertine-lined waters almost daily, despite admonitions and citations from rangers, who regrettably have become de-facto babysitters to ensure proper behavior.

With millions of acres of public lands just in Colorado alone, though, the odds of rangers catching people ruining things for the rest of us are lamentably low. But if you’re like me and are unafraid to confront lawbreakers — politely, of course — you typically will face disregard at best and belligerence at worst.

Some people just don’t play well with others.

When it comes to leaving indelible marks, I suppose we could consider the ancient petroglyphs and rock art left by Native Americans centuries ago as primitive graffiti, no matter how revered they have become.

Perhaps in decades or centuries our descendants will celebrate today’s obscenities scratched into sandstone and crass carvings into aspen trunks as quaint and worthy of reflection, similar to how I show off to friends a semi-secret campsite near me demarking the names and dates of hunters from the early 1900s.

But I’d guess that, even then, today’s “art” will be considered just as trashy then as it is now. Steve Lipsher (slipsher@comcast.net) of Silverthorne writes a monthly column for The Denver Post.