National Park Service agents are looking into a string of paintings defacing parks from Crater Lake to Zion/Screen grab via Modern Hiker
A wandering artist with an affinity for using slices of national parks for her palettes, an apparent disregard for the law, and a penchant for documenting her works via social media channels, has drawn the attention of the National Park Service.
From Death Valley to Crater Lake, from Yosemite to Zion, a woman who goes by the nom de plume "creepytings" has evidently left a trail of acrylic paintings on rock outcrops in the parks. With strokes of blue, white, brown and red paint, as well as markers, she sketches faces for all to see.
A bald-headed face with a snake for a tongue was apparently painted on a rock near the Mist Trail in Yosemite. Another of a blue-haired dude appears on an outcrop with Crater Lake in the distance, while another face -- with zig-zagging lines not unlike those you might see on prehistoric rock art -- is said to have been placed on a rock atop Telescope Peak in Death Valley.
The story, which was brought to light Tuesday by Modern Hiker, quickly made it over to Reddit, where a poster referred it to a ranger at Yosemite National Park. The investigation might not take long, as the artist signed the paintings with her creepytings moniker.
Pictures of the images were posted on creepytings' Instagram feed, which was closed to the public Tuesday...but not before Modern Hiker Founder and Editor Casey Schreiner was able to grab them. He also was able to grab an Instagram chat creepytings had in which she admitted the images were painted with acrylics.
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In our town, graffiti is not accepted as art. There's a very strong anti-graffiti campaign. Anyone caught is jailed, fined, and sentenced to spend something like 100 hours miniumum erasing or painting over graffiti. Juvenile offenders are also frequently given service hours for grafitti removal even though their offense may not have involved graffiti.
It has been in use for about five years now and the amount of new graffiti is obviously much less than it used to be. Even gang tagging is down. There is also an enhancement for gang tagging that adds a lot more hours to their service time.