It took more than a year, but crews at Joshua Tree National Park, aided by professional conservators from the University of New Mexico, have largely “erased” graffiti scratched into the Barker Dam, a historic site inside the California park. Barker Dam is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
The year-and-a-half partnership culminated with a weeklong project in March, where architectural conservators from the University of New Mexico volunteered their skills to effectively mitigate the visual impacts of scratched graffiti from the entire surface of the dam.
The dam can still hold water, but the ongoing drought in California has severely reduced annual precipitation. Lowering water levels in the dam exposed the naturally weathered surface and vandals were quick to act. In less than a year, scratched graffiti spread across over 50 percent of the entire surface of the dam.
UNM conservators employed a method known as “in-painting” to blend the scratched areas into the surrounding naturally weathered surface. “In-painting” is a time-consuming and labor-intensive process that involves adding pigments to the scratched areas with a method similar to the painting style of pointillism. Instead of merely painting over the graffiti entirely, the paint is applied in a way that matches the surrounding colors, textures, and patterns.
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I am Jeff Clark, founder of Internet Brothers, producer of this blog, and passionate about hiking. I live in Western NC near the Blue Ridge and Great Smoky Mountains. Pisgah and Nantahala National Forests are just out my door, so the content will focus on these areas, but let me know what you would like to see on the site. 
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