An investigation is ongoing to track down whoever hacked up nine saguaro cacti in Saguaro National Park, including two that were estimated to be at least 150 years old.
Park officials hope the older saguaros will be able to heal over the wounds slashed into their trunks, but two of the smaller ones were completely cut down and left in slabs on the ground, said Chief Ranger Ray O'Neil during a phone call Tuesday.
“This certainly appears to be destruction for the sake of destruction," he said. "It was not as if somebody was doing something for a purpose.”
The vandalism occurred along the Gould Mine Trail, near the King Canyon Trailhead, in the park's Tucson Mountain District.
Vandalism has been somewhat prevalent in the National Park System in recent years, ranging from acrylic images painted on rocks in a number of Western parks and theft of windows from historic cabins in Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina to spray-painted grafitti on chimneys of replica Revolutionary War huts at Morristown National Historical Park in New Jersey and grafitti on red-rock cliffs in Arches National Park in Utah. Previously at Saguaro, which once had a saguaro-poaching problem, a youth was arrested in 2013 for "tagging" some of the iconic cacti with spray paint.
Chief O'Neil said Tuesday that poaching of saguaros, done by folks seeking to add the cacti to their yards or to sell them, seems to have stopped being a problem. But now the park is faced with tracking down the individual, or individuals, who hacked away at the nine saguaros and also damaged some smaller cholla and prickly pear cacti sometime late Friday night or early Saturday morning.
“The larger ones were easily 150 years old, if not 200 years old or more," the chief ranger said. "Our assumption is that we believe it was a heavy, longer sharp object. Maybe it wasn’t a small knife, maybe it was a machete or larger.”
So far no reward has been offered.
At Friends of Saguaro National Park, a fund has been set up to raise money for both monitoring and research into the saguaro forests, which led to creation of the national park in 1933. You can donate to it at this site.
Here are some images of other vandalism perpetrated on the national parks in recent years:
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Comments
I wonder if publicizing such malicious acts of vandalism doesn't in fact encourage such low-life scum to do it again since they got their 5 minutes of fame this time? Such shallow, empty people . . . how can anyone with any sense of honor do such things? But then, I just answered my own question: they have no honor.
Jerks at work.
Could a go fund me account or something of such should be set up for a reward for who has information to the vandals?