Mile after mile of dazzling land- and waterscape at Glen Canyon NRA sometimes proves too irresistible to visitors who want to mar it with graffiti/NPS, Brent and Dawn Davis

Glen Canyon National Recreation Area in southern Utah is a tableau of blue and red; blue from Lake Powell's waters, and red from the embracing red rock cliffs. For some visitors, it's an irresistible canvas to scratch their names, initials, or something else into the sandstone. Fortunately, the GRIT team is ready to respond.

Armed with sandpaper and wire brushes, members of the Graffiti Removal Intervention Team head out across the NRA to look for graffiti and do their best to erase it. 

"Depending on how tough the sandstone is, you can either just rub it out with sandpaper, or wire brushes," explained Edmonia Martinez, the coordinator for the GRIT team at Glen Canyon as well as coordinator for the NRA's Volunteers in the Parks program.

Recently, rangers at Rainbow Bridge National Monument, which can be reached by boat on Lake Powell, took those tools to graffiti that had been scratched into a sandstone cliff there.

“Typically, Rainbow Bridge doesn’t get any graffiti. It’s a high traffic area, everybody loves Rainbow Bridge. So it was an unusual thing to happen," said Martinez during a recent phone call. 

A visitor to Rainbow Bridge National Monument couldn't resist leaving their mark near the stone bridge/NPS

Rangers were able to quickly remove the graffiti with wire brushes and sandpaper/NPS

The graffiti was spotted on August 31, a Saturday. Martinez and some GRIT team members had been at Rainbow Bridge that morning, checked the area for graffiti before leaving, and found none. The next day, though, she received a phone call from a tour boat's deckhand who reported initials scratched into the sandstone near the stone bridge. Martinez then contacted rangers at the site, and they were able to remove the graffiti. (Initial reports that more graffiti was scratched into sandstone in the area after the rangers removed that which was reported to Martinez were erroneous, she said.)

While that defacement was relatively quickly dealt with, the GRIT team doesn't lack for graffiti to remove from sandstone canvasses in the NRA.

"The big picture is that the GRIT team has removed approximately 9,000 square feet of graffiti so far in the fiscal year ending September 30," said Mary Plumb, Glen Canyon's spokesperson.

“On the flip side, we found an additional 6,000 square feet to go through the compliance process to get removed," added Martinez.

"Compliance" is the process park staff is required by the National Environmental Policy Act to go through before tackling graffiti to ensure their are no cultural, archaeological, or other resources that must be protected.

"The reason they were able to remove it so quickly at Rainbow Bridge is because (the area) has already gone through the compliance process," Plumb explained. "It was within an area that already had been cleared by our NEPA compliance process. So if graffiti is found in a place that is in a culturally or archaeologically sensitive site that hasn’t gone through compliance, we have to go through the compliance first before we can remove the graffiti.”

In case you're wondering, graffiti detemined to be 50 years or older is considered archaeologically significant.

To put some perspective on 9,000 square feet of graffiti, that's an amount that would cover about 1.7 linear miles, said Martinez, or stretch across nearly 30 football fields placed end-to-end. The graffiti has been found in the NRA's Padre, Gunsight, Horseshoe Bend, Wiregrass, Antelope, Labryinth, Willow, and Davis canyons, said Plumb.

“We’ve had 80 volunteers with the GRIT propgram. They’re phenomenal, obviously," said Plumb. "We want to give great kudos to the whole team and everybody who volunteers. And we’re always looking for new volunteers.”

GRIT team members removed nearly 2 miles of graffiti at Glen Canyon NRA this fiscal year, which ends Sept 30/NPS

Unfortunately, it seems to be easier to attract volunteers than to catch those who feel compelled to leave their mark on the NRA. However, one individual was caught in the act earlier this summer, and was handed a meaningful sentence.

"His repercussion was a mandatory eight hours of community service, and we had him remove graffiti for eight hours," said Martinez. “That was really great. The person got a better understanding of how widespread the problem was. Definitely got a better appreciation for how many volunteer hours go into removing it.”