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Authorities look for woman who may have vandalized 10 national parks

The National Park Service is looking for a vandal who appears to have left paintings at landmarks including Vernal Falls in Yosemite.
The National Park Service is looking for a vandal who appears to have left paintings at landmarks including Vernal Falls in Yosemite.
(Mark Boster / Los Angeles Times)
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The National Park Service is hunting for a serial vandalizer: a woman believed to have spent the last few weeks visiting parks in the West and defacing landmarks by painting images on them.

The park service believes as many as 10 parks have been vandalized, including Yosemite and Death Valley.

Authorities are tracking the woman, who appears to have posted incriminating selfies of herself and her work on Instagram.

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The images, which appeared on blogs earlier this week, show drawings of faces accompanied by the name “Creepytings” and the year. At Yosemite, an image is painted on a rock near Vernal Falls, and at Death Valley a multicolored painting is on a slab of rock at Telescope Peak.

Park Service spokesman Jeffrey Olson said he couldn’t comment on the investigation but said that the woman’s posts have sparked an outcry on social media, where sentiment appears to strongly condemn the woman’s actions.

“They say flatly, ‘This is inappropriate’ ” Olson said. “For every American, this is your birthright, your heritage, your legacy.”

The hiking blog Callipidder reported that a woman from New York named Casey Nockett had been documenting her trip — and her scrawlings in the parks — on Instagram. The account under that name has since been deactivated.

Other blogs linked to a Tumblr account in which the woman responded to a friend who saw the photos and asked if the paintings were in chalk. The person identified as “creepytings” responded that the medium was acrylic paint, adding, “I know, I’m a bad person.”

The vandalism charge is not taken lightly by the park service and is a federal crime.

A Pittsburgh man who scrawled graffiti along the upper Yosemite Falls trail was prosecuted in federal court and earlier this year was fined $5,791, placed on probation and ordered by the judge to post on his Facebook page that he had received the maximum penalty.

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Kari Cobb, a Yosemite spokeswoman, said defacing park property is not common, but that visitors have carved their names into trees and into moss growing on rocks.

“Yosemite is lucky — we have an amazing restoration crew,” Cobb said. “They are going to figure out ways to get rid of that graffiti. It may take a while, but I have no doubt they will do it.”

Twitter: @julie_cart

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