Route Editor
Route Scout
Arizona Daily Sun - August 11, 2010:
Coconino National Forest employee Sean Murphy shakes his head as he looks down at a burning cigarette in this forest's most popular cave.
This will be one of his smaller irritations for today.
"How're you going to remove that graffiti?" a hiker in the cave asks.
"I don't know," Murphy responds.
The 700,000-year-old Lava River Cave northwest of Flagstaff is now home to vandals with spray-paint cans, leaving damage far more lasting than the trash and toilet paper previously found.
The vandals paint their names along with notes saying they visited. They also leave depections of marijuana leaves, mushrooms, and illegible signatures and designs on the walls.
Many are dated 2010.
At a junction where the fork splits, large letters read: "Which way I'm drunk."
"It's begun accelerating so much," said Murphy, the trails and wilderness coordinator on the Peaks and Mormon Lake ranger districts.
Although it has received trash, this cave has never before looked like the underside of a metropolitan freeway underpass.
Coconino National Forest employees visit several times a summer with wire brushes and various chemical agents, sometimes spending a day scrubbing just one marking on the wall, Murphy said.
FASTER PACE OF DAMAGE
People are marking the walls with graffiti at a faster pace.
"We can only send someone down here so many times a year to try and scrub this stuff off," he said. "It's not like we have an army to send down here."
Toilet paper is found often on this day; he once found diapers here, too.
There is no serious plan to close the cave or find a private company to manage it, but such ideas have been discussed in the local forest agency.
Near the end, at 3,820 feet in, the cave walls have bright graffiti all around, several feet in height.
This is on top of small scratches where people left names and initials.
Scrubbing the wall leaves marks of paint and an unnatural look.
"The whole idea is to provide a natural experience so that people can see what this place looks like," Murphy said.
RIPPLES ON THE FLOOR
All the other nearby caves in the Coconino National Forest remain unidentified on forest maps, much like archeological sites, to keep them protected.
The Lava River Cave is the longest lava tube type of cave in Arizona, according to the Coconino National Forest.
It was formed when lava flowed horizontally from a volcano, cooling on the top and bottom, but remaining flowing outward in a middle-column area where the cave now exists.
The cave has ripples on the floor, like water, from when the lava was in peaks as it cooled. There also are rocks on the floor that appeared to fall onto the surface of the molten, 2,000-degree lava and stick in place.
Cracks in the cave floor are from when the lava cooled. They are about 6 inches wide, 3 feet deep and more than 20 feet long, according to the Forest Service.
USED AS REFRIGERATOR
Loggers discovered Lava River Cave about 1915.
With an entryway that sometimes holds ice and a consistently cool temperature, it was also a site of ice collection and a refrigerator.
Litter and more minor graffiti became a problem starting in the 1960s.
There were periodic trashings, followed by cleanups, including a big cleanup in 1991.
The parking area was then moved farther from the cave entrance to make it more difficult to bring large volumes of trash into the cave.
Camping near the cave, lighting fires in it, using it as a toilet, leaving trash in it and taking pets into it are prohibited, but the rules are difficult to enforce.
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