Maybe someone could do a historic photo exhibit to memorialize the graffitti rock that was recently removed from I-5 south of Bellingham.

Coming into Bellingham on I-5, there has been a famous rock painted with many layers of expression over the years. It's commemorated graduating classes and lots of other things.

There is now a local controversy as the rock has been destroyed. It basically fell victim to salmon stream restoration. Washington State has been ordered, by treaty obligation, to remove culverts under highways for improving salmon passage.

There's lots of construction for daylighting streams along I-5 and other roads and paint flakes from the rock can be poison near streams.

Some folks had wanted the Department of Transportation to move the rock to another location, but I guess that was determined too expensive. The rock was broken up instead.

The rock basically fell victim of contradicting demands from various constituencies of the public. Salmon restoration versus an affordable highway system. Keeping gasoline taxes from going through the roof while maintaining highways. I guess much of the highway budget, these days, goes to habitat restoration in this state. So much of life is about tradeoffs.

Since I don't drive, the rock hasn't been real important to me. I do remember some car and bus trips into Bellingham, during my college years, seeing a few of its graffitied presentations.

During the 1980s, soon after bicycling was allowed on rural shoulders of I-5, I stopped by the rock to hike up there. At its base were slabs of paint that had broken off. Each slab consisted of, possibly hundreds of paint layers in various colors. I took a slab home for souvenir. Eventually, I threw out that slab as it was crumbling and leaving a mess of paint flakes.

Recently, I got to thinking that good way to memorialize that rock is to collect pictures of its various paintings over the years; possibly for an art exhibit. Maybe someone has already thought of that.

A new sculpture could be placed in some public spot with the surface covered by various pictures of the original rock. Photos could be glazed into ceramic tiles covering the surface of a new boulder in some Bellingham park.

While I have none of my own photos from that famous I-5 Bellingham rock and I didn't keep that crumbing paint slab I found from the rock in the 1980s, I have found other souvenirs along roads. I still have a pile of warning signs that must have fallen off a tanker truck. Here are a few of those changeable metal signs. I wrote about the rock's demise in an earlier post.

I tend to ride less on I-5 shoulders, these days, than back in the 1980s after it was first legalized. Back then, the wide shoulder was, and probably still is, safer than many roads. The 55 mile per hour speed limit was still in effect from the 1970s, oil crisis. Today, traffic is flying by faster and there is probably twice as much traffic in this region as there was in the 1980s. More backroads have been improved since then as well.