Minturn – The route up to Mount of the Holy Cross through its namesake wilderness area is lined with a rainbow of blue columbine, magenta fireweed and golden aster – and now, thanks to a spray-can-wielding itinerant, white paint.
Officials at the U.S. Forest Service recently learned that an unknown vandal has marked dozens of rocks and even a tree trunk with 2-foot-long painted arrows to mark a little-used descent route on one of the most revered and beloved of Colorado’s fourteeners, the 54 peaks that are 14,000 feet or higher.
“For over 100 years, people thought of this place as pristine, so the damage cuts to the core of the basic concept of wilderness,” said Beth Boyst, wilderness specialist for the White River National Forest. “For someone to deface this area is sad and offensive.”
The arrows often run next to a clearly visible path that requires no guidance, and they lead hikers down a route that is much steeper and more difficult than the easy main route down the peak’s north ridge.
“There’s a trail, and you don’t need those,” said Tracy Lindberg, 19, of Denver, who was hiking down from the summit last week. “It’s just taking away from the beauty.”
Named for its distinctive, 1,500-foot-high natural cross of snow on its east face, Mount of the Holy Cross earned worldwide fame through the 1873 photographs of William Henry Jackson, and his viewpoint from adjacent Notch Mountain became the site of annual pilgrimages that attracted as many as 2,000 Christians in the 1930s.
In 1980, Congress declared the picturesque setting as a wilderness area, ordering it preserved in its unadulterated state for generations to come.
The arrows, Boyst said, are an “obnoxious” intrusion and a federal offense punishable by a $5,000 fine should the culprit ever be caught.
Among mountaineers and wilderness advocates, such permanent human marks in the backcountry stand as exceedingly bad form.
“It’s pretty much a disgrace,” said mountaineer Steve Hoff meyer of Nederland, who discovered the arrows while leading a Colorado Mountain Club trip up the peak this month. “There’s no reason for that.”
Hoffmeyer, who publishes the popular 14er World online magazine, posted a message about the arrows in the website’s forum, and the response was unanimously negative.
The culprit probably thought painting the arrows was being helpful, said T.J. Rappaport, the executive director of the Colorado 14ers Initiative, a nonprofit organization that builds trails and restores damaged areas on the state’s highest peaks.
“The difference here is between a person who is well intentioned but doesn’t know how to leave no trace and a person who took it a step further,” Rappaport said. “They intentionally left a trace.”
Taking the proper route down from the summit of Holy Cross can be tricky, Boyst said.
As a result, the Forest Service has constructed 5-foot-tall cairns, visible even in low light, to mark the main route. But some backcountry purists object even to those, and rangers have a constant battle to keep them from being dismantled.
“It’s really disheartening when we go to all this trouble to minimize impacts (of wayward hikers), and then they take the cairns down,” Boyst said.
As many as 150 people attempt to reach the summit of the 14,005-foot peak each summer weekend day on a hike that is difficult only for its 14-mile round-trip length, 4,500-foot elevation gain and 900-foot climb to Halfmoon Pass on the return.
On a visit to Holy Cross this week, wilderness ranger Cindy Ebbert said forest crews will try to use wire brushes to remove the paint before resorting to solvents.
“It’s a shame we have to do this,” she said. “It’s a total act of vandalism.”
Staff writer Steve Lipsher can be reached at 970-513-9495 or slipsher@denverpost.com.
