Graffiti found at Arches National Park shows the impact of the government shutdown, former parks employee says

MOAB, Utah (ABC4) — Rocks near Landscape Arch were recently found graffitied with paint, and one former parks employee told ABC4 that this shows the impact of the government shutdown on the National Parks.

ABC4 spoke to Allyson Mathis, a retired National Park Service employee who found the graffiti. She was a Park Ranger for about 20 years, working at Canyonlands, Capitol Reef, and the Grand Canyon. She was hiking in Devil’s Garden with a friend from out of state, and they were hiking the trail to Landscape Arch when they noticed the graffiti.

“I know the parks well. I never worked at Arches, but I worked in nearby Canyonlands, and I’ve been on the Colorado Plateau for more than the last 30 years,” Mathis explained, “And so I know the landscape well, and when something’s out of place, I notice. And I saw high up on a rock, close to where the trail gets to Landscape Arch, I saw some white writing that was really bright in paint.”

The paint looked new, and Mathis was really concerned about it. She climbed up the rocks to get to it and take a photo, and then she saw even more graffiti.

“To me, it looked like it happened since the last rain, and so that would definitely be during the shutdown,” she said. “The parks aren’t being patrolled the way they normally would be, and they’re not being protected the way they normally should be.”

She explained that part of the mission of the National Park Service is to preserve parks for the benefit of future generations. “That part of the mission of the National Park Service is what is not happening right now during the shutdown, and seeing that graffiti at Arches was just a real tangible reminder of how these vulnerable, beautiful places are at risk.”

Mathis said that most of the graffiti they see at Arches and Canyonlands is light scratching with a rock, but this is paint, and paint is pretty much permanent in these situations.

“You want to do something to mitigate that fresh paint for a couple reasons,” Mathis explained. “One, to preserve the experience that people in the park are having, and then secondly, if there’s graffiti somewhere, it’s much more likely that there’ll be more graffiti, so it kind of breeds. So, you want to be able to respond to it quickly and somehow cover it up.”

Mathis reminded of the importance of leave no trace, the outdoor ethics that you should follow everywhere you go, but this is a bigger issue than just that.

“National parks change lives. That’s one of the powerful things about them. They’re part of the American story, and they tell the American stories, so we need to treat them with respect and enjoy them while we all work together to protect parks for the benefit of future generations,” Mathis said.

Fixing this graffiti could take time, Mathis said. “For the paint, I would say that they would have to call in a specialist, and I do not know if Arches National Park has that specialty on hand. And that’s where, let’s say, the regional office would potentially come in, but the regional offices under the Trump administration are down like 25%.” Mathis explained that staff and specialists in the regional offices have been leaving, and that they have not been replaced.

“Managing the national park, there’s a lot of behind the scenes work that happens too, and that’s not happening right now. And for example, field work with the biology here in Southern Utah falls a time of year when that would be happening and it’s just not happened. And so a lot of the monitoring of let’s say endangered species that probably would have been happening this last month, six weeks, just didn’t happen this year, and that’s a loss,” Mathis concluded.