Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/04/15/death-valley-national-park-ran.html
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Give it a few hundred years and it will become a treasured land mark.
I dunno… if it is over done I think it is bad. Occasional marks on stones like that, I really see no harm. Assuming you aren’t harming pictographs and the like or destroying actual rock features.
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I’m of two minds on this. Humans have been doing the equivalent of “I wuz here” on bare rock faces for millenia. I get the impulse. However:
1 - There are billions more humans now than there were millenia ago. If we all signed our names, it would be nothing but “I wuz here” written everywhere we go
2 - There are fewer wild places now, exacerbating the impact of (1)
3 - It’s not a very creative or aesthetically pleasing form of vandalism.
4 - Once would be more than enough. We get it Steve.
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As a rock climber, our community gets all sorts of flack when stupid yahoos carve things into rocks. Trying to minimize our impact, but needing the occasional piece of protection in the rock, and then getting sucked into debates about dammage because someone self centered thinks their message deserves to be there for all eternity. The “no harm done” idea is frankly stupid as fuck.
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The whole idea of a National Park is to preserve some piece of natural splendor in its current, not-fucked-up-by-humans state for future generations. If you must leave some evidence of your existence for future archeologists to find then there this is not the right place to do it.
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Yeah! The NPS is not the NSA. The latter will preserve your shit forever!
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My spouse lost her custom engagement ring somewhere in a lawn next to a strip mall in Orlando on our way to the airport after a family visit. We had to catch a flight back and so we didn’t have time to go back and look for it.
I’m hoping that it got buried deep and will be found by the cockroach archeologists once they evolve enough to replace mammals.
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It’s almost as if we were living in a lawless time, condoned from the the highest levels.
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Many decades ago, I lived in a little mining town out in the Mojave desert. The road between that godforsaken place and the nearest outpost of civilization runs through a little canyon (know to some of the locals as “Poison Canyon”). The rock faces there are frequently vandalized with variations on “I was here”, “John loves Jane”, and random obscenities.
Locals periodically come out and paint over the accumulated graffiti using rock colored paint. They do a pretty decent job of color matching, so mostly their work is invisible.
One bit of graffiti that is not only not covered up, but periodically retouched, is the eyes and mouths on a rock formation some of the locals call Fish Rocks.
ETA: The rock formation depicted above is only about 40 miles (as the buzzard flies) from the nearest part of Death Valley National Park.
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Considering that a mass murderer is squatting in the White House and pretending to be dictator of the world right now, I have a difficult time becoming outraged over minor league criminals like “Steve & Lacy.” Still, if you let off a mugger just because there are bank robbers in the world, you’re not doing yourself a favor.
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Rangers can’t do much about Dick Tater, Fuckface at Large, but they can saw off and throw Steve & Lacy’s hands over a cliff for the coyotes, letting those two touch their faces with virusy bloody stumps all they want…which I will happily send a portion of my Trump Virus Check to encourage, in spite of the ever-decreasing chances I’ll ever visit that park.
Back when I was a young man, many a trip to Death Valley National Park were ruined because we spent so much time in heated debates concerning whether Steve and Lacy had or had not been there based on little more than minutiae masquerading as clues and wild speculation.
You kids today have it too easy.
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Amen. And anyone who goes near a cliff face is a “rock climber” too as far as most reporting is concerned. Never mind that climbers as a group a largely super responsible stewards of the places we play. Most of us have a very finely honed sensitivity to access issues and it’s rare to see people actively screwing shit up. When they do we’ve also got a damn good reputation of self policing. For better and sometimes for worse.
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Yes thank you for this. Because it’s not really about “vandalism”. It’s about adding vs subtracting value. Doesn’t matter if it’s here on this forum, across the side of a building, or a rock in the national parks if your defacing something for shameless self promotion then fuck you, but I’m fully supportive of anyone making an honest attempt to add value through the creative process.
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What if Steve brought in his own rocks? Littering, not defacing.
So it’s back to war with Canada then? How much more can we take from these outwardly polite hypocrites defacing our national treasures.
Yep, the difference between graffiti and tagging
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It’s not quite ISO 8601, but I’m still happy to see a date format that survives a lexical sort.
Nice work Steve and/or Lacy.
For the most part you are correct.
Here is an example of when things go off the rails a bit:
