Graffiti Bloom

 

Visit #1495, Saturday 7 September 24, 7:00-10:05AM, 5.6 miles, 8.3 lbs. of litter.

Temps in the 60s, sunny and pleasant. Showers forecast for the afternoon.

During last week's hike I discovered some graffiti inside Castle Craig, which became a trail of graffiti apparently made by the same person. At that time I tried my usual removal methods but progress was too slow for my tastes. I was going to follow this trail in reverse and address it more aggressively.

I know it's not much but this scribble was the start of the trail as I walked up the road around Merimere Reservoir.

Along the way I found this very tired snake. Dead or not, I'm not touching him!

Nearing Echo Point, a couple on bikes who I've seen before, approached. As they passed, the man said something like "I see you here a lot; you do quite a bit of work.", to which the woman added, "You should be on the payroll!"

I got a belly laugh out of that!

At the north end of the reservoir was the next piece of wayward art which was obviously made with the same crayon.

I walked the road up to Castle Craig, and went inside to remove the graffiti which started all this last week. I tried removing this graffiti then which is why it's slightly dulled. But it was stubborn so my return visit was necessary. It didn't stand a chance against my magic rag.

I climbed the stairs to inspect for more and on the way down found what I was looking for. But I had already packed away the magic rag so I used Option #2. As pal Elmer wrote to me earlier this week, "Two is one, and one is none” its a military saying that means to have a backup plan. The idea is that if you have a mission-critical item, it will likely malfunction, get lost, or break, so you should have a backup."

This was  my backup.

Nearing the Halfway House, I found another playing card like the ones I found last week.

A game of Crazy Eights, anyone?

Hiking down back to the park I met another hiker who showed me a brief video on his phone of an animal he had just encountered on the road to West Peak, asking me what I thought it was.  The two had a brief staredown but the hiker wasn't going to play Marlin Perkins; like I said-the video was BRIEF.

The video was pretty clear. I'm no zoologist but it was either a bobcat or a mountain lion. Had I been able to take the video home to do some searching I could be more certain.

As I neared the park, I was disabused of the idea that I was done with graffiti for as I reached the Soap Box Derby Track, I found this:

The gray paint you see is from my previous work covering over graffiti several years ago. It was a good run while it lasted.

I couldn't let this go. So I returned Sunday morning at the crack of dawn to avoid scrutiny and applied a fresh coat of coverage.

Another hike is in the books.