Pick up 4343 pieces of litter

although I still haven’t found all of the notes I took to create all of the entries I wanted to post. But I need to clear up some space for new goals, so it’s time to mark it as completed. Maybe someday I’ll come back and wrap up the entries ;)

Also, although I’ve completed the goal, I’ll still be picking up pieces of trash- unfortunately, I don’t think that the problem of litter (and the underlying problem that causes most of it- self-centered people) is going to go away in my lifetime. But at least I can stop obsessively counting, photographing, and listing the trash I pick up ;)

7/10/08 Crown Hill Park in Arvada, CO

This is a suburban park that gets a lot of use, so it usually has a moderate amount of trash. You can see from the photo that this was soon after the 4th of July- there were a couple pieces of fireworks trash. Also, the park’s trail is paved and is used by a lot of families- the long streamers in the photo are the stupid things that manufacturers put on the handlebars of kids bikes (which fall off and become litter the first few times they ride them).

A note about this goal- although I’ve continued actively in picking up and photographing for the goal, I have a break in my records after 7-10-08. I picked up a bunch of litter while I was on vacation and I kept track of it, but I moved soon afterwards and my notes are “temporarily misplaced.” I’ll start posting again when I find my notes.

7/6/08 Bear Pk. in Boulder, CO

This trail was actually relatively clean- only 26 small pieces of trash, most of it apparently inadvertantly dropped, in a 5-hour hike on heavily-used trails.

7/5/08 Parking lot in Arvada, CO

Ok, I don’t usually bother to count it for this goal when I just pick up a piece or two of trash at a time.

But hey, those add up too!

Mainly I’m just entering it because I happened to have my camera with me to take a pic ;)

7/3/09 Chimney Gulch Trail

Some mountain bike parts again- this trail is pretty rough in places. I’m not sure where the glove came from, as it didn’t look like they had done any work on the trail lately.

6/28/08 Bison Peak Trailhead

In contrast to the very few pieces of litter I found on the Bison Peak Trail (previous entry), I found quite a bit of trash in the parking lot. At least most of it looked like it had been there for quite a while. Look at all of the pop tops in the lower left of the photo! It’s been nearly 30 years since cans had pop tops!

6/28/08 Bison Peak Trail

Considering that this was a long hike (15.4 miles roundtrip!) there was very little trash on the trail. Since most of it is in the Lost Creek Wilderness Area, that’s heartening to see.

A bit of orange peel (biodegradable eventually, but it still doesn’t belong on the trail), a few stray scraps, and a couple of old pieces of glass I found at the summit were about it.

6/26/08 Apex Park

Misc. trash, most of which seemed to be mountain bike parts or other items accidentally dropped.

6/21/08 Squaw Mtn.

I took my daughter up to the top of Squaw Mountain, an easy hike along an access road (there are radio towers and an old fire tower on top) not too far from Denver. Squaw is a favorite X-C ski trip of mine because there’s no avalanche danger, and it’s also a nice family hike that has some great views of the Mount Evans area. Unfortunately, since there’s a road most of the way to the top, there’s also too much trash along the way.

Some of the larger pieces of trash in this pic are from near the trailhead, but others (including the many shotgun shells) are from the side or even the middle of the road.

6/19/08 Chimney Gulch Trail

More glass from the road crossing and mountain bike parts, plus 3 rusty nails from the parking lot- I’m glad I saw them before I ran over them!