The Brief

You’ve probably heard the phrase “leave no trace” when you’re camping or hiking, but lots of people visiting Joshua Tree must’ve missed the memo.

Graffiti and vandalism regularly pop up across the national park — on signs, rocks, campsites, and trees — but coordinating the clean-up can take time and a whole team of people.

Anna Tegarden, who manages Joshua Tree National Park’s science and geographic information systems, told LAist that while they have a lot of staff keeping an eye out for chalk, nail polish, and even ketchup-based designs, they need the public’s help protecting the more than 795,000 acres of natural space.

“These lands are not only for us, but they are for our future generations, and we would like for them to be in the same pristine, as close to pristine, condition that we see them in, and we try to keep them in,” she said.

Keeping the desert clean

People have used acrylic paint, stickers, and charcoal to vandalize the park, but Tegarden said spray paint is the most common offender.

A black-and-white face spray painted across several rocks in Joshua Tree National Park.

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Anna Tegarden

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Joshua Tree National Park

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If a parking lot, road sign, or other modern infrastructure is targeted, it can be cleaned up almost immediately by trail teams, but it gets more complicated with vegetation or historical structures.

“If it is on anything other than something modern, it does have to go through cultural [teams] to make sure that there's no concerns from a cultural aspect, and that can take some time,” she said.

If they’re not concerned about cleaning off a specific spray painted rock, volunteers and trained staff will suit up in full protective gear armed with wire brushes and “elephant snot” to paint over the markings.

And yes, Tegarden said the suits are as hot as they look under the summer sun.

“[Elephant snot] reacts with the paint on the rock and it starts to bubble, and it does that best when it's warmer,” she said. “So it's easier to clean up when it's warmer, it kind of sucks for the people cleaning it up.”

How the park keeps track

Joshua Tree National Park uses a database with several different attributes and metrics that helps staff map out the vandalism and prioritize their response.

For example, if a 5-foot-tall piece of graffiti is bringing in a lot of reports from visitors, that’s going to get bumped up to a higher priority. But if it's a mile out into the backcountry and way off trail, it will be a lower priority.

Volunteers or trained staff tasked with cleaning up spray paint around Joshua Tree National Park start off by using wire brushes and "elephant snot" to paint over the markings.

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Anna Tegarden

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Joshua Tree National Park

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Volunteers or trained staff cleaning off graffiti from rocks in Joshua Tree National Park with "elephant snot," wire brushes, and full suits of personal protective equipment.

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Anna Tegarden

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Joshua Tree National Park

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Each year, the park averages 250 reports of vandalism. So far this year, there have been about 113 vandalism reports.

Areas near campgrounds are where more than 86% of vandalism occurs, Tegarden noted.

Authorities are also able to increase patrols in those areas to stop vandalism in its tracks, but it also helps crews plan out the best way of cleaning up.

“If you don't clean it up quickly, more graffiti starts occurring,” Tegarden said. “Graffiti begets more graffiti.”

How you can help

You can help Joshua Tree keep its natural beauty by reporting vandalism to jotr_graffiti@nps.gov.

People have used stickers, nail polish, and even ketchup to vandalize the park, but spray paint is the most common offender.

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Anna Tegarden

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Joshua Tree National Park

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“Report it as soon as possible, and I realize most of the park has no cell phone [service], but as soon as you're going through an entrance station, you can talk to them, they can take the report and send it in,” Tegarden said.

Taking pictures is really helpful, she added, especially if you have the location turned on your phone so officials can pull more information from the metadata.

The park also puts on events for volunteer “Graffiti Busters,” which Tegarden said people can find more information on here or here.

An all-ages play about the life of Dolores Huerta and other under-told stories of the farmworker labor movement is back on tour in Los Angeles.

The show's extension had been announced prior to the news that Huerta died Wednesday, Oct. 28., at her Bakersfield home. She was 96 years old.

“There's this perception that farm work was only done by men,” said playwright Eliana Pipes. “There were women on the fields, there were women on the picket lines, and there were women in leadership in the United Farm Workers movement.”

Center Theatre Group commissioned ¡Sí Se Puede! from Pipes in March 2025 and it debuted in L.A. this spring.

The next free, family-friendly shows are:

• Wednesday, Nov. 4, 6:30 p.m., at the Ketchum-Downtown YMCA: 401 S. Hope St. Los Angeles
• Saturday, Nov. 7, 2 p.m., at Christine Emerson Reed Park: 1133 7th St., Santa Monica
• Saturday, Nov. 14, 2:30 p.m., at the East L.A. Civic Center: 4801 E. 3rd St., Los Angeles
• Sunday, Nov. 15, 4 p.m.,  at Latino Health Access: 450 W. 4th St., Santa Ana

Right around the year 2000, there was a club night in Hollywood called Clockwork Orange. Fans of The Smiths, Depeche Mode, Bauhaus and other bands came for the DJ’s mix of their favorite songs but also for a vibe that welcomed people regardless of race, ethnicity or sexual and gender identity.

“I was a pretty shy person, and so that was a place where I could sort of be myself and express myself,” said Azalea Camacho, a regular there in those days.

She had just graduated from Workman High School in the City of Industry and was also clubbing at rockabilly music nights in Rosemead and goth club nights in downtown L.A.

Camacho said there was lots of memorabilia from those times, such as photos taken in and outside the clubs, ticket stubs and promotional fliers. They're the physical remnants of those supportive communities built around music and enjoyment, but many of them languish in shoeboxes and storage units, at risk of being lost — along with the memories attached to them.

Cal State LA has hosted Sounds of the Underground Archive for the last four years. It's an opportunity for people to donate their underground music scene memorabilia.

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Courtesy Special Collections and Archives, University Library, California State University, Los Angeles

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“I think the danger is maybe those stories are not being told, or people don't know about the story,” she said.

Keeping stories alive

More than two decades later, Camacho is now in a position to make sure those stories are kept alive. She’s head of special collections and archives at the university library at California State University, Los Angeles.

Four years ago, she and library staff created an annual day for area residents to donate or digitize memorabilia for their Sounds of the Underground Archive. This year it's on Thursday, Nov. 5. They’ll accept physical donations, but they’ll also have a scanner to digitize printed material, so people can keep items that are precious to them.

Camacho is hoping this year will bring in a bumper amount of memorabilia. It's taken time to get the word out, she said.

“From the actual community archiving day [we’ve collected] maybe 100 or less than 100 items. … It's not a lot,” she said.

She said they're on the lookout for a wide range of mementos, including:

• Fliers
• Handbills
• Zines
• Newsletters
• Posters
• Set lists
• Photographs (prints, negatives or digital files)
• Cassette tapes, CDs, or vinyl records
• Ticket stubs
• Wristbands
• Band merchandise (stickers, buttons, patches, T-shirts)
• DIY press kits or liner notes and correspondence (letters, emails, messages related to music scenes)
• Venue or collective ephemera (membership cards, schedules, announcements and more)
  

Los Angeles has handily broken its record for most days of coastal flooding in a year. And that’s without including October in the tally and with a wet El Niño winter ahead — a worrying sign for coastal homes and infrastructure.

Researchers can’t yet project how many more days of flooding we’ll have in 2026 — but we’re already well ahead of what the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s models had forecast up to this point.

NOAA oceanographer Karen Kavanaugh said models had predicted three to six flood days between May 2026 and April 2027. Those models took El Niño and sea level rise into account. She said that there have already been nine flood days in that window and added that the 12 flood days so far in the calendar year are “abnormally high.”

The number of days of coastal flooding observed at NOAA’s tide gauge in San Pedro is the highest recorded since observations started being taken in 1923. The previous record was set at nine in 1983, during another El Niño event.

When might we see more flooding?

Kavanaugh couldn’t say with certainty when flooding might occur, but noted that high-risk times ahead coincide with Thanksgiving and Christmas. Around then, the moon will be at its closest point to the Earth. The stronger gravitational pull from the moon causes what are commonly known as king tides, a nonscientific term for the highest predicted tides of the year.

In addition to these factors, the wide range of events affecting our tides this year, including storms, climate change, El Niño and related Kelvin waves, could very well cause other flooding events or cause the existing ones to become stronger.

Kavanaugh said a combination of factors — specifically Kelvin waves and astronomical high tides — was exactly what was responsible for the flooding seen this week.

“That could happen, perhaps, again in November and December if we have another pulse of a Kelvin wave,” Kavanaugh said.

Flooding inundated coastal communities around Southern California this week, including Orange County's Sunset Beach.

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Robert Gauthier

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Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

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How high will the tides be?

Unfortunately, Kavanaugh said, there’s no way to predict the severity of upcoming king tide events at this moment in time.

“But as we move closer to an event, there are good models that the National Weather Service uses to forecast flooding,” she added. “But they need it to be within seven days, sometimes shorter timelines.”

How to prepare for high tide conditions

Kavanaugh recommended keeping an eye on National Weather Service reports for the latest information and predictions. (There are separate pages for Los Angeles and Orange counties.)

Kavanaugh stressed that, given this year's unpredictability so far, people should be as prepared as possible.

“It's an unusual type of phenomenon to plan for for some communities,” she said. “We're used to planning for a big storm, maybe, and flooding from that, but not planning for, ‘Oh, it's gonna be beautiful sunny weather, and also you might have flooding on the roads.’”

Kavanaugh also recommended paying close attention to local emergency officials’ guidance and being mindful not to park cars in low-lying areas that could end up being inundated.

“If [local officials are] asking you to get sandbags or things like that, keep those sandbags because you might need them again in a few weeks,” she said.

The federal government must pull three taxpayer-funded Trump administration ads that appear to have been made for political or propaganda purposes, including one touting the president’s claim that every American will get $5,000 if Republicans keep control of Congress in the upcoming election, a judge ruled Friday.

U.S. District Judge Jennifer L. Rochon in New York sided with a coalition, including the nonpartisan watchdog Common Cause, in ordering the government to take down the advertisements titled “$5,000 to Americans,” “Every Democrat Voted Against No Tax on Tips,” and “Cost of Socialism.” She declined to pull several other ads.

She said the three ads must be taken off official government websites, including social media sites such as YouTube, Instagram and the like. Rochon also ordered the cancellation of any plans for the airing or distribution of the ads through authorized third parties, including by President Donald Trump’s flagship super PAC, MAGA Inc.

Rochon was nominated to the court by then-President Joe Biden, a Democrat, and once served as a law clerk for Trump’s sister, the late Maryanne Trump Barry, a longtime federal appeals court judge.

Responding to the ruling, White House spokesperson Lauren Bis said: “This Biden-appointed activist judge issued a lawless order to stop the administration from sharing patriotic videos.”

Rochon ruled during a hearing in which she considered expanding a temporary restraining order she issued two weeks ago, when she banned a series of ads that glorify Trump and echo his political messaging going into the midterms.

The plaintiffs sought the removal of at least 13 ads, but Rochon only ordered that the three be pulled, at least for now. She noted that the Government Accountability Office has observed that there are instances when the president’s office is entitled to inform the public of its policies, justify its policies and respond to attacks on its policies.

Rochon said the plaintiffs were seeking to restrict the office in ways that were “broad and far reaching” and she found herself concluding that the government will ultimately prevail legally with regard to many of the ads.

The White House has defended the ads as public service announcements akin to what past administrations have made to promote various policies. But the recent ads differ from many past public service announcements because they don’t try to help the public benefit from specific government programs, according to the plaintiffs.

After Rochon issued the order, she noted that she was doing so on a Friday afternoon and that the government would have no excuse to delay taking them down immediately.

A government lawyer acknowledged that he would be able to immediately notify relevant individuals responsible for taking down the ads.

“Everyone is here. Everyone can hear my order. No one is at the theater,” the judge quipped in a reference to excuses offered by government lawyers when her recent order, issued over a weekend, wasn’t immediately obeyed.

Rochon said irreparable harm could result to the plaintiffs if she didn’t ban the ads while the court case proceeds, though she noted that she could reverse herself and restore the ads or ban additional ads after hearing more evidence in the coming weeks.

“This court can neither postpone an election nor turn back the clock,” Rochon said after concluding that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claims regarding the ads and would suffer harm if they were not taken down.

“This temporary restraining order will stop the administration’s wanton disregard for the law while the court hears the full case,” said Bradley Girard, a lawyer with Democracy Forward. “Congress has made clear that partisan ads cannot be funded with taxpayer dollars, and we are proud to work with this coalition to earn today’s result.”

In court papers, the coalition’s lawyers wrote that Congress did not appropriate funds to the president’s office “to run a PR shop to help the President’s allies and attack his perceived ideological opponents.”

Assistant U.S. Attorney Jeffrey Oestericher wrote in response to the plaintiffs that there was nothing wrong with White House staff compiling advertisements to “inform the public about his policies and to rebut attacks on those policies and his Administration.”

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Associated Press writer Michael R. Sisak contributed to this report.