Speleothems and leaving it better than you found it (art, vandalism, and Lehman Caves)

As part of our visit to the Great Basin National Park, we went to the Lehman Caves. You can only go into the caves as part of a guided tour with a ranger. (This makes sense when you hear about incidents such as this vandalism at Racetrack Playa or the eejit munters described in this article.) Both this logistical fact, and a part of the tour itself, got me thinking about what the difference is between graffiti and vandalism.

The caves are a seemingly endless succession of vistas into baroque formations of limestone - fantastical columns, shields, and spikes. These have a collective name: speleothems (an abnormally ugly word). It's an astounding and beautiful place. I allowed myself 50 'wow's and I'm pretty sure I got through them all as we walked through alien gullets and otherworldly landscapes, past and even under massive shields, cave bacon, cave popcorn, shallow pools.



Before the parks service took it over, visitors were encouraged to break off stalactite souvenirs to take home. So even without knowing what structural alterations have been made for easier passage through the caves, you can tell where people used to go, especially nearer the entrance. Nowadays, of course, you're encouraged not even to brush against the cave as you pass through. (The orientation video goes into an awful lot of detail on what not to do.)

The lighting is mostly well designed to let you see the formations without being too intrusive. In the very first 'room', the ranger stopped us and turned off all the lights except for one candle-strength LED torch, to show more of what this was like for visitors before the lights were installed. The resulting darkness added to the eeriness of the caves, was nearly impossible to photograph, with no tripods allowed. It looked pretty much like this.

I think it's interesting to look at changes that people have made to the caves. There is no evidence that any humans went beyond the entrance of these particular caves before Lehman (or his friends or hirelings) got in there and starting enlarging passage space with sledgehammers around 1885 or so. So all these changes have happened over a pretty short and well-defined interval, with a couple of specific periods that help bracket particular kinds of changes - mainly before and after 1933, the start of NPS stewardship. (More detail about the ownership and use of the caves at this NPS page.) Here are the ones I spotted or was told about during our visit:

Handrail and walkway

• Passages between rooms have been created or enlarged with sledgehammers
• A new entrance blasted into the side of the hill and closed at either end with heavy doors
• Bats were locked out for some decades by the covering of the natural entrance
• A walking path has been made. Although much of the time a visitor has limestone underfoot, a variety of industrial-style metal railings, walkways, and stairs make much easier and safer the transition between rooms and the passage through smaller rooms. It's well maintained, though still slippery in some places and low clearance in a lot of places.
• Floor in the 'Lodge Room' cleared and evened? For the dances, picnics and lodge meetings that were held there in the 20s
• Candle-soot initials in the grandly named Inscription Room
• Lighting has been installed and presumably maintained

When we reached the Inscription Room, the ranger directed out attention to the ceiling, which is

Inscription Room, Lehman Caves

liberally marked by holding the candle up until its soot left a concentrated black spot, then moving it to form shapes (mainly letters: initials and the odd short name). The ranger facilitated a discussion on people's impressions of the 'inscriptions'. How did we feel about them? Did we like or dislike them? Of course there were several different opinions, and the ranger himself stepped in to report a couple that had not been represented. I'm guessing this discussion is a part of the tour script rather than his own personal initiative, but maybe I am doing him a disservice. It's certainly the part of the tour that's stayed with me most clearly, more so than almost anything else he said.

Petroglyphs and graffiti at Newspaper Rock, UT

Because I keep thinking ... how come ancient rock art is so valued and modern graffiti is not? There's some discussion of that in this post on the art-crime blog. "The legal distinction between destructive permanent graffiti and art is permission," the author states ... but goes on to point out that there's plenty of street art that didn't have permission.

And the authors of these cave inscriptions did have permission, but in an informal survey it seems like plenty of visitors think these graffiti are completely inappropriate, even allowing for how long ago they were made. Is that partly because they're understandable, lacking the mystery of the petroglyph? They have the same form as some modern graffiti - and for that matter marks left on Egyptian stonework a couple of hundred years ago. Does readable = mundane? I have to say I think there's more aesthetic value in the petroglyphs, but I'm not competent to decide whether there's more historical value.

The marks in the Inscription Room have not been removed, because they are already old enough to be protected. Here in the US, when you're on federal land, it's a moving line, though a firm one. Any cultural artefact more than 50 years old is supposed to be left in situ as it should be assessed by an archaeologist and will usually be protected unless there's some pressing reason otherwise. (So yes, that means tin cans from the 50s ... though not from the 70s. Great example of this here!) And that means graffiti from the 1910s is protected, but not that from the 2010s.

Where is the dividing line where it stopped being okay to write, paint or incise on natural surfaces? This cave is somewhere on the fuzzy boundary.  I had been thinking there will be a mysterious gap for future historians where graffiti in parks stops (well, alas, almost stops) - but I guess there won't be any shortage of the stuff itself.

Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that the criterion to use for evaluating these kinds of endeavour is the same as for any art - as simple, and also as contested, social, and shifting. Does it help us interpret the world, see it with new eyes, value it more, give us a better moral sense, or some elevation of the kind? Or else does it, at least, leave the place better than the artist - or perpetrator - found it? So judging by that standard, I still can't decide, because these candle-soot monograms made me really think about art versus vandalism.

Mind you, I will still be leaving my permanent markers at home.

National Geographic Great Basin National Park video on Lehman Caves (2 min)