Graffiti a growing blight on Ape Cave

Graffiti has become a growing problem inside Ape Cave at the Mount St. Helens National Volcanic Monument over the last few years. U.S. Forest Service officials say they’re working on a plan to remove it, but the cave’s sensitive environment poses complications.

At 2.5 miles long, the Ape Cave is the third-longest lava tube in North America and a top attraction for visitors coming to Southwest Washington. But hikers who have walked through it in recent years have passed by spray-painted graffiti at various locations throughout the cave. Some of the graffiti inside is at least 2 years old and sits at various levels throughout the cave.

“We did find new graffiti in there yesterday — and a pretty massive amount of it, actually,” said Chelsea Muise, recreation program manager on the monument. “We were doing a normal cave patrol and they could smell it — it was that fresh. It was done the night before.”

Muise said the agency has looked for solvents that will remove the paint without damaging the cave’s ecosystem. But finding the right solvent has proved difficult, partly because different types of paint require different cleaning products. Whatever products they do use are likely to largely stay in the cave’s ecosystem, and chemicals like mineral spirits and other graffiti-removal products are hard on the environment.

“We’re trying techniques that are safer for the cave, but they don’t tend to work as well as the major chemical stuff that we really don’t want to use,” Muise said. “We’re going through a testing phase.”

She said the agency is also working with cave exploring groups who advocate for sandblasting the markings, but that poses its own challenges. The clubs are also planning to survey the cave and install markers every 100 feet to help the Forest Service better document the exact location of new damage as it appears. Once that work is complete, the Forest Service plans to focus on cleaning up the most egregious graffiti.

The cave is open all year, but the Forest Service estimates that between Memorial Day and Labor Day alone, 150,000 unguided hikers from around the world walk through the lightless, undulating black volcanic rock formation. Muise suspects the damage is done by people living in the area who know when the Forest Service isn’t around.

The people doing the damage are rarely caught. Those who are were reported to the agency by other visitors.

“It’s something that happens in Ape Cave unfortunately; it’s the issue of it being open 24 hours a day and us not being able to staff it constantly,” Muise said. “Gating the cave would prevent most of this from happening, if not all of it.”