Effort to Clean up Vandalized Pictographs Causes More Damage

Salt Lake City,UT,USA

An unauthorized attempt to clean up graffiti on a historic rock art site may have ended up causing more damage.

The Bureau of Land Management and Emery County had offered a $1,000 reward for information on the vandals who defaced the Buckhorn Pictograph Panel with charcoal and chalk.

Since then, someone attempted to erase graffiti reading "I love you Wendy."

"They made more mess than if they'd have just left it," said Reed Martin, a former Emery County Centennial Commission chairman.

The new "Wendy" graffiti - in its own style of picto-script - was discovered July 19, Martin said, and the cleanup attempt was made in the past week or two.

It appears that the graffiti was scrubbed, he said, and mud was used in an attempt to replicate the color of the surrounding rock. But the scrubbing abraded the rock and took off the natural varnish protecting it.

The ancient pictographs themselves were not damaged by the graffiti or the cleanup effort, Martin said.

On Friday, the BLM flew in an archaeologist and art restoration expert, who had finished most of the cleanup, Martin said.