Park rangers cited and released Douglas Jones, 57, on Aug. 17 with abandoning property, littering and feeding wildlife.
“Since (some time in) 2007, he had been coming into the park and just throwing golf balls across the landscape just tossing them out of a vehicle,” park spokesman Joe Zarki said Wednesday. “Apparently, there’s some tennis balls involved, as well.”
Jones also left cans of fruit and vegetables along the side of park roads and scattered park literature and permit forms, Zarki said.
“It wasn’t daily, but frequent enough that rangers were aware of it and keying into looking for this individual,” he said. “It was a time-consuming and fairly expensive issue for us.”
Zarki said park rangers spent more than 370 hours looking for and cleaning up after Jones, who is believed to have scattered as many as 3,000 golf balls at different locations in the national park.
“We had $9,000 of staff time tied up into that,” Zarki said.
Eventually, rangers found Jones in the park, confronted him and he confessed to what he had been doing, Zarki said.
Zarki said Jones told rangers he threw the golf balls because he wanted to leave his mark and also to honor deceased golfers. He left the food for stranded hikers.
Jones is scheduled to face a magistrate from the U.S. District Court at the end of the month.
Zarki said judges have some latitude when assessing penalties for violations of park rules. If found guilty, Jones could face fines or jail time, be barred from entering the park or be assigned another form of restitution.
Attempts to contact Jones were unsuccessful Wednesday.
SOURCE: USA Today
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