A white patch covers an area where vandals painted anarchist words and symbols last week.

CAPE DISAPPOINTMENT STATE PARK, Wash. — The 117-year-old North Head Lighthouse at Cape Disappointment State Park was vandalized last week, park rangers discovered early in the morning March 30.

There are no suspects and the prank has not been repeated as of April 6, but Park Ranger Nick Schwalb said, “We’ll be looking out for it.”

Rectangles of white paint create a sort of patchwork on the side of the lighthouse and nearby buildings, covering spots where the vandals spray-painted words and anarchist symbols in three different colors of paint. The vandals also hit a portion of the sidewalk running between historic outbuildings near the parking lot and vacation rentals up hill from the lighthouse. North Head lighthouse is in the process of being restored and much of it is engulfed in plastic tenting and metal scaffolding; the vandals only painted on the lower, exposed parts of the structure.

Long Beach Police received a report but park rangers handled the incident.

Park rangers say there is no way to really secure the lighthouse. The park has installed gates at various park attractions for security reasons before. A gate, for example, blocks vehicle access to Beards Hollow after hours. But such a gate would be problematic at North Head because of the vacation rentals located at the site. Access must remain open there because of guests coming and going, Schwalb said.

Still, he added, additional security is “definitely something we’re looking in to.”

He and other rangers could not remember a case of vandalism happening at the lighthouse before. When the news broke online, many readers were outraged, asking who would want to damage such an important, historical structure. “Makes me sick,” one reader commented. “Some have no respect or appreciation for anything — seems that beauty brings out the ugly in some people. Very sad.”

In 2010, however, two men wreaked far more expensive havoc on Oregon’s Cape Meares Lighthouse when they fired shots at the lighthouse, shattering 15 windows and the historic, hand-ground Fresnel lens made in France more than 120 years ago. The men pleaded guilty to two counts of criminal mischief in the second degree, admitting they had been drinking at the time but still taking responsibility for “one stupid night” where they had done “some really stupid things,” in the words of the Tillamook County District Court judge who heard their case.

They could have faced felony charges for their drunken shooting spree, but a plea deal pieced together by the judge, the district attorney and defense attorneys and approved by federal agencies, state agencies and a local non-profit group sentenced them to serving three 16-day stints in the county jail over the next three years and paying $100,000 in restitution.

(One of the men, 24 years old at the time, was later arrested for violating the terms of his probation. According to news reports from 2011, he showed up at the Tillamook County Sheriff’s Office to claim property investigators had seized during the lighthouse case smelling of alcohol and high on methadone.)

The destroyed Fresnel lens at Cape Meares was virtually irreplaceable; the damage done to North Head is not nearly so bad. Its original antique first-order Fresnel lens, lit on May 16, 1898, is safely housed in the nearby Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center. A fourth-order lens that replaced it in 1935 is now displayed at the Columbia River Maritime Museum in Astoria. An electric appliance how provides the lighthouse’s light.

North Head’s exterior needs to be re-coated anyway, rangers said, though that work is not currently scheduled to occur anytime soon. It is possible it could be recoated next year, Schwalb said. Right now, contractors are more concerned with the interior where years of accumulated moisture has eaten away at the structure.