Graffiti

I've come to a kind of moral obstacle here.

One of my favorite places to hike has a few miles of hiking along beautiful, glacial-carved clifftops, with wonderful views of the country valley below. I mostly spend my time day hiking there, but I have spent a couple nights up there as well.

Anyway, because the hiking trails are so close to civilization, many of the cliffs are littered with graffiti. None of it's artistic. It's mostly names and dumb phrases. Someone even thought it'd be appropriate to grace the stone with a large, "420".

I'd love to see this graffiti gone. Since carrying a generator, compressor, and sandblaster up the mountain is impractical, I've considered some other options. I could build cairns over some of the more offensive pieces. Non-permanent, kind of natural looking, and much less intrusive than the graffiti. Not a bad solution, but it'd be silly to build a couple hundred of them.

Then there's stone-colored spraypaint. Assuming that I could match the color, it might work pretty well. But I wonder if that would make me as bad as the other "artists". Not to mention the negative impact on the environment that a dozen cans of spraypaint could have.

Anyway, I'm not exactly the activist type and I'm not sure I would do anything, but I'm definitely thinking about it. Has anyone ever considered anything similar before?

Don't spraypaint over it. you make it worse.

Sometimes you can get appropriate solvents to remove it. but blasting it works.

Been their and done it with a friends of trail crew. - sandblaster on ATV/horseback. maks you *really* hate graffiti.

The only people I know with more of a hate for it are the guys in the local caving society who go clean up one of the accessible caves every year - They haul stuff down to blast it off!..

Don't try painting over them. Paint is paint, and unless you can remove it, you'll just end up making the paint spot bigger. (Besides, most rock isn't a uniform color; it has gradations and imperfections - even a close match will stick out because it's a solid block of uniform color.)

Sounds like a good Eagle Scout project - contact your local Scout troops and find out if they've got kids looking for projects. They might be able to organize an effort, research removal methods, and get some volunteers to help.

Be glad it's paint. Where I hike, there are some sandstone cliffs where the local idiots use knives and chisels to carve their inanities - impossible to remove without doing even more damage.

The Eagle Scout idea is a great one. I will definitely look into that.

ATVs are out of the question in this area; you'd never get one up there. Horseback's a possibility, though. First I'll have to get permission and find someone with horses, but I suppose it's worth looking into.

I had a feeling that the paint probably wouldn't look good. I'd thought about making up some color swatches and bringing them up with me to see if they match, but I'll take your advice and skip that all together.

Glenn, there are a couple of places where people have scratched/chiseled things into the stone, but they tend to be small areas and aren't nearly as noticeable or offensive.

Thanks for the advice, guys.