June 25 Trip Report/graffiti removal

Finally made it down to tackle some of that graffiti. I brought this stuff called Taginator which is popular with forest service because its strong but biodegradable. Got to Freedom parking lot at 7:30am and nobody there. Headed down and backtracked to bowen trail to find the major graffiti area looking to see if the swastika was in the place it was last time. Nothing like that there and most of the graffiti on those rocks was covered by gray spray paint. Worked on some of the uncovered graffiti on freedom. Finally got down to the creek crossing and found the huge rock with all the graffiti that says "Fuck you" and a list of names, unfortunately I had used a lot of the remover on the way and ran out before I could properly work the graffiti off. I have a couple other kinds, one that's called Elephant snot that's also eco-friendly, so I will return to finish the removal. I did my best to at least blur the text into intelligibility.

Alone at the springs til Darwin and Christine showed up around 9am, my guess is they have been doing longer term camping along the creek and have been regularly cleaning the pools, building up a creek pool with sandbags, and brought in the new slackline. The serenity pool had no sand in it at all! The other pools looked really great, super beautiful, clear and very blue. While I commend Darwin for his work I know he also loves to do fire poi, and have huge bonfires down there. Unfortunately he has a near endless supply of firewood because the flooding washed up a ton of driftwood into that area. I broke up any of the fire pits i saw on the beach and cleaned up the trash i could find, mostly clothes and towels and some small wrappers, cigarette butts. Overall pretty minimal trash.

More people showed up around 10am, peak was at noon and started to dwindle by 4pm. The day was beautiful and partly cloudy, high of 84 but very windy, really helped to keep us all cool. The crowd was very chill, maybe 25 people at the max but always coming and going. Probably 50% nude but then after 6pm became more nude friendly. I left around 8pm and finally saw the swastika on the trail that was painted over, I also saw another uncovered swastika right on the trail up to freedom parking area. I will return soon to get those out as well as finish the rocks on the beach!