Earlier this week, the Morongo Valley’s Big Morongo Canyon Preserve suffered rampant vandalism that included graffiti and destruction of property.
In two separate incidents—one less apparent on the night of Sunday, July 7th, then another more serious call on Wednesday morning, July 10th—the Preserve’s Executive Director Kevin Wong received multiple calls from staff and visitors regarding tagging and five of the benches on Marsh Trail were ripped from their mounts and overturned. Some may see this as a case of insult to injury, occurring in the wake of damages in ongoing repair from last year’s Tropical Storm Hilary, but Wong and the Preserve’s staff have chosen a different perspective.
“Our first reaction when we saw it was shock,” Wong said. “And a sense of violation of a nature preserve. But about an hour after as we’re standing right over here talking, ‘Okay, how what are we going to do, how we’re going to plan it, who’s available to do the work…’ a Mama deer with her really young fawn came over and kind of stood there and looked at us and we went, ‘Okay, you know what? On the big scale of things this is nothing. Wildlife was not hurt, it wasn’t a flood, it wasn’t a tropical storm, it wasn’t a wildfire—it was just humans doing stupid things and the one thing we can count on in life is humans will do stupid things. It was an irritation, but the wildlife continues to live so let’s just take the irritation out of our minds and get back to work.”
Wong said the other good news is that vandalism is a rare occurrence in the Preserve. He said the shock came from the fact that the Preserve is off-the-beaten path compared to the National Park, where vandalism occurs far more often, something he unfortunately saw regularly in his eleven years working there and continues to be an issue.
“Because we’re just off the radar of so many people, we don’t expect to have that happen. But we’re being naive about that. On the other hand, we know most of the people that come to visit so we’re in our own little bubble. So this is just a shock, but we’re over it. The teams were already out yesterday. They cleaned the graffiti off of everything, now we’re going to start pulling the benches off the boardwalk, bring them down to the Education Center where we have a sheltered area where we can build new ones and then track them back out and remount them.”
Wong said the timing of the repairs are occurring when the Preserve isn’t very busy due to the extreme heat, and he emphasized the outpouring of support they received from their regular visitors in the wake of the vandalism, including a healthy amount of monetary donations. To further the Preserve’s supportive testimony, he shared an email he received this week from a newer visitor regarding the vandalism:
“My girlfriend and I stumbled upon Big Morongo Canyon Preserve a few years ago during our annual trip to Joshua tree National Park and fell in love with the preserve. I’m saddened to hear of the vandalism. Thank you for all you do for such a beautiful and special place.”
“We’ve got good support,” Wong said. “The fact that they found it and fell in love with it and want to support us. It’s part of really what we want to do—build a community of people that support us and get to know us.”
