Scrawl of the Wild : Tagging, the Plague of Urban Environs, Has Spread Into the Backwoods of the San Gabriel Mountains

Drive beyond the grit and graffiti of the freeways and head into the heart of the Angeles National Forest, up California 39 as it twists and turns above Azusa and leads to a mountain sanctuary of bears, hawks, mountain lions and wild trout.

Barely five minutes from the freeway, at the boundary of the 693,000-acre forest, a burnt-orange graffiti sample on a granite wall of San Gabriel Canyon says “HIP.”

Travel a short distance and you see red-painted graffiti on rocks that shout the proclamations of gangbangers and taggers on hillsides of chaparral abloom in mountain laurel and wildflowers.

“L.G.D.P WAS HERE,” one says farther up the two-lane road. “4 LOKOS CREW,” black paint screams.

So it goes, mile after mile, rock after rock: graffiti march upward in a dramatic urban assault on the forest, severely eroding the preserve’s tranquillity and threatening safety, say U.S. Forest Service officials and Sheriff’s Department deputies.

Nine miles up the canyon, beside one of the best trout streams in the state, boulders as big as cars are covered in paint. FLACO DUARTE, says a smaller blue-painted one, amid a graffiti chorus of creek-side rocks. Five other gang names are nearby in colors of the rainbow.

In the last few years, the in-your-face graffiti of the city have spread far into the backwoods. From Mt. Baldy on the southeast edge of the Angeles National Forest to Pyramid Lake in the northwestern edge, graffiti now abound. And with them come the problems of gang violence.

Last summer in San Gabriel Canyon, a 12-year-old boy shot and killed a teen-ager who had marked over his graffiti on a restroom, said Michael Rogers, supervisor of the Angeles National Forest.

“I’ve seen a large increase in graffiti ever since the riots last spring after the Rodney King verdict,” Rogers said. “We’ve seen a lot more vandalism, graffiti, more body dumpings and even more killing.”

Among the graffiti-prone areas of the forest’s five districts, Rogers and other Forest Service officials cite Big Tujunga Canyon, Delta Flats, Colby Ranch, Little Tujunga Canyon Road, Gold Creek, Angeles Crest Highway, San Antonio Falls, Mill Creek, Piru Creek, OK Canyon, Little Rock Canyon, Eaton Canyon and Millard Canyon.

“It kind of brings you down,” 20-year-old Kelley Figueroa of West Covina said as she and her boyfriend, Tom Martinez, 23, hiked along the West Fork of the San Gabriel River one recent morning.

In shorts and hiking boots and equipped with a canteen, they trekked toward the rocky landscape where Nelson bighorn sheep roam. “We’ve come so far away from the city,” she said, speaking above the river’s roar. “But you’re reminded of the city as you walk past the graffiti,” he said.

In the forest’s Tujunga District, graffiti have recently appeared on the high desert side where they had rarely been seen, said Tujunga recreation officer Julie Molzahn, who serves on a countywide graffiti task force.

“It used to be that graffiti was just along the main roads. Now, it’s all the way back into the wilderness,” said another Forest Service recreation manager, Tony Martinez, among the small group of officials and volunteers leading an underfinanced, anti-graffiti campaign.

No longer is it simply the “John loves Mary” of yesteryear carved on the trunk of an alder or oak, Forest Service officials say. It is the tagging of gangbangers, who have taken to the woods to make their marks.

“It’s a free-for-all up here now. It’s been getting progressively worse,” said Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy Dave Smail, who for nine years has patrolled San Gabriel Canyon.

Symbols of gangs from throughout Southern California and even Arizona have been left in the canyon, he said, and it is not uncommon for scores of gang members to gather on a weekend.

Last year, he witnessed a two-car chase of gang members. “It was like the old Hollywood-type shoot-out, right out of the car windows,” he said, adding that one person was slightly injured.

Gangbangers may be shooting one another but in the overall graffiti war, Smail said, “they are the ones winning the battle.”

Glen Owens, who heads an outdoor preservation group called the Big Santa Anita Historical Society, based in Arcadia, said, “When you go to the forest and see all this graffiti, it’s like the pioneers when they came across burnt covered wagons and said: ‘There’re problems here, baby.’ Families see all this graffiti and they don’t want to go there.”

Since the mid-1980s, Owens’ group, which publishes books on the San Gabriel Mountains, has contributed thousands of dollars to anti-graffiti efforts in the forest.

Though reluctant to be critical, Owens said, “the Forest Service has dragged its heels. The outrage is that they have the equipment and (the graffiti) is not being removed.”

By comparison, he said, “if the forest is on fire, they move real fast--because a fire will destroy the forest. But doesn’t graffiti destroy the forest, too?”

Forest Service officials say they face a formidable task, not just from graffiti but from the constant abuse occurring from a small percentage of the estimated 32 million visitors annually, who make the Angeles one of the most used forests in the nation.

“We’ve worked awfully hard to get rid of this stuff,” Angeles National Forest official George Duffy said as he walked along the West Fork of the San Gabriel River and scanned two riverbanks filled with graffiti-covered boulders and cliffs.

There have been sporadic, concentrated efforts to remove graffiti, Duffy said. The Forest Service, he said, often works with Los Angeles County road crews and state highway workers.

But there is little funding for such work, he said, complaining that 12 years of the Reagan and Bush administrations “certainly was not a kind period for the Forest Service” budgets.

Graffiti first surfaced about a decade ago as a major problem in the Angeles National Forest, said Will Shaw, a ranger on the Arroyo Seco District who is responsible for graffiti removal there.

“I’ve fought this long and hard,” Shaw said as he sandblasted rocks and trees covered with graffiti near Chantry Flat above Arcadia. “The social ills down there in the city end up here. But if it’s all nice and clean here, the taggers know that ‘the man’ is here. That’s a deterrent.”

One natural limit to the graffiti comes from the taggers’ own unwillingness to walk far from the road, said Scott Mathes, who heads the Glendale-based California Environmental Project, which is overseeing volunteer efforts to rid trash from forested areas of the county.

Still, he said, he once climbed high into a rocky perch above a gorge north of Big Tujunga Dam and saw graffiti in the most impossible place to reach. “It was way up there and in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “It just makes you shake your head.”

Education is a key to eliminating the problem, said Molzahn. But she said there is little money and staff to do what needs to be done--going into schools and also into the forest to teach people a respect for nature.

“I don’t know if we have answer. I don’t know if anybody has an answer,” Rogers said. “We take (graffiti) off one day. The next night it’s back up again.”

In some cases, the rugged terrain that provides graffiti painters a vast canvas proves to be their downfall.

Two teen-agers spraying red graffiti onto the prominent face of a sheer cliff over the San Gabriel River a few years ago became trapped. Sheriff’s deputies had to rescue them with helicopter and rappelling ropes.

Just last month, the sheriff’s helicopter flew to the aid of a 26-year-old man--suspected of painting graffiti near the spectacular Fish Canyon Falls above Azusa--who had broken an ankle.

And the same day at the falls, two hikers told deputies they spotted someone with a spray-paint can, readying to make his mark on rocks already covered by graffiti.

“Hey, don’t paint that rock,” the hikers said they shouted.

The tagger replied: “What difference does it make? The rock’s already been written on.”

That day, too, hardly five miles away as the hawk flies, Tony Martinez of the Forest Service was in the forest with a small crew of workers who were sent to him to work off the community service requirements of court-imposed penalties. None, however, was there due to graffiti crimes.

As they sandblasted graffiti in the parking lot by a bridge over the San Gabriel River, Martinez said: “I’d like to think that someday we could clean it all off.”

The next day, barely a mile up California 39, new graffiti covered the pavement of the mountain road.