A massive effort to remove graffiti from a multiroom natural cave underneath the craggy peaks of Mount Lemmon is underway.
Hundreds of spray-painted tags mark the walls of Peppersauce Cave and water bottles, containers and assorted trash has collected along the floor of the cave easily accessible from Oracle.
The degradation attracted the attention of the U.S. Forest Service and the Central Arizona Grotto, a local cave-conservation group that is part of the National Speleological Society.
The cleanup effort, a year-long undertaking, is being managed by Ray Keeler of the grotto organization.
Volunteers worked in February “to remove all of the graffiti to and including the Big Room and the Main Lake Room,” he said. Volunteers returned this weekend and will come back again in the fall.
Other caves in the area, like Colossal Cave and Kartchner Caverns are protected through state regulations and admission fees. Visitors are monitored as they tour the caves.
But Peppersauce, deep on the north side of the Santa Catalina Mountains, is one the few public cave systems in the state where anyone is free to wander, day or night. For visitors, the isolated nature of the cave is part of the attraction. No lights. No rangers. No oversight.
The cave’s tiny entrance leads to a darkened limestone corridor. Straight ahead is a wall with a two-foot opening at the bottom. After a quick shimmy on the dusty cave floor, visitors enjoy the cold, pitch darkness on the other side. The humid cave air is still and silent.
Headlamps and flashlights only show the surface. Hidden in the shadows and nooks are interconnected passageways.
While Peter Kane steadies a ladder, Devra Heyer uses a power drill and a wire brush to try to remove a graffiti tag.
With about 7,300 feet of subterranean path, the cave twists and turns through open rooms and tight crevasses leading to pools of natural water engulfing the black depths of the Catalinas.
For the past several years the cave’s smooth limestone walls have been increasingly vandalized.
An assortment of names, spray-painted arrows and other crude images are drawn or etched into the rock walls. Layers upon layers of incomprehensible words make sections of the cave look like the back page of a high school yearbook.
“It’s been tagged pretty hard the past seven years,” Keeler says, “Somebody should take care of it, and we’re the people that do.”
The past year, there have been a few excursions into Peppersauce for cleanup.
This is how one area of Peppersauce Cave looked before a restoration team got to work on Feb. 10.
Nicole Davis was part of a group that entered in August 2017. She was assisted by Arizona State University students who belonged to the school’s outdoor club.
Together they scrubbed and cleaned the walls with liquid solvents. Davis admits it was mostly an experiment to see how effective the cleaning could be.
Hand scrubbing graffiti is as difficult as it sounds.
“It takes about a half-hour to one hour to remove one tag,” she said. For the more difficult removals, sandblasters are needed.
Last fall some 300 pounds of trash was removed from the cave along with graffiti near its entrance.
Cleaning the remaining rooms would prove to be a daunting task. There were at least 600 graffiti tags in the cave at that point, Keeler estimated.
On Feb. 10, a team of volunteers entered to remove those tags. That Saturday morning, the dirt road just outside the cave’s entrance was loud with the hum of generators. The machines pumped electricity and compressed air down hundreds of feet of hose to the volunteers working inside.
In a corridor named Three Fissures, about 30 volunteers worked in an illuminated area using brushes and hoses to scrub away graffiti. Some graffiti tags brushed away with ease, while others seemed to have permanently stained the rock.
“We’ll just have to have the sandblaster team come in later to try and take care of those,” said Davis.
Volunteers remove graffiti in Peppersauce Cave inside Mt. Lemmon near Oracle, Ariz. on Feb. 10, 2018.
Workers tried their hardest to be delicate with the cave interior. Blue tarps were laid out along the floor to catch any debris or unwanted chemicals. Paint-removing solution was diluted with water to lower acidic levels, which could harm the cave’s rock lining. Davis and her fellow workers used a combination of brushes to scrub delicate rocks.
Ultimately the workers came together like a construction crew. Most of them were covered in layers of protective clothing, goggles, helmets and breathing masks. After that weekend, Keeler hoped to be more than halfway finished with the cleanup.
Keeler has kept a close eye on Peppersauce Cave for years. In 2000, he was part of a restoration project in there that lasted a decade. That year, the goal was the same, remove graffiti and trash.
However, the conditions were so poor then that the natural pools were full of E. coli bacteria. Keeler and his crew were able to restore the area and in 2003, the cave’s pools tested negative for E. coli.
The graffiti is more than an eyesore for visitors.
The aerosol and other chemical components hurt cave life, says Sarah Trube, a cave resource manager and park planner for Kartchner Caverns State Park.
“Caves are a very unique place in terms of the microbial community,” she said.
The current state of Peppersauce, Trube says, leaves her disheartened.
“It’s really depressing and sad,” Trube said, “but I’m glad we’re finally doing something about it as a community.”
Peppersauce Cave is mostly a “dry,” or non-living cave, but there are some sections that are “wet,” or living. Davis noted that the restoration crew is more careful in living areas.
After completion of the 2010 project, upkeep and monitoring stopped. The vandalism returned.
Keeler says the trouble for Peppersauce started in the 1950s after it was featured in National Geographic.
That publicity led to a high amount of interest and a lot more visitors.
“It was heavily abused after the article,” Keeler said.
Keeler said he was skeptical that the state or federal government would establish protections similar to other large caves here.
Still, he said he hopes the Forest Service will add security in the future. Aside from on-site rangers, he said wildlife cameras would be a welcome addition, though he says he worries about unattended cameras being stolen.
Heidi Schewel, a spokeswoman for the Coronado National Forest, said she wants projects like the Peppersauce cleanup to educate the public about behavior that can be harmful to delicate landmarks.
“We hope that people who go into Peppersauce would care enough about the environment to try and protect it for future use,” Schewel said.