End of season roundup and Litterati

[Mnoutdoorfunguy]

Another paddling season has ended for us here in Minnesota.
The boats and gear are stowed away.
We had an average number of miles paddled as well as different bodies of water we were on.
That was despite the fact that we didn’t take our normal late Spring trip because of COVID.
Our trash pick up totaled 1100 pounds, our second highest.
The lakes were extremely busy earlier than normal and throughout the season.

Next season we are going to try a new APP for the trash we find: Litterati

https://www.litterati.org

Having no experience with it, I cannot say much about it.
Hopefully, it will help us make a bigger impact by getting others involved wherever they may be.


There is another, similar APP called Pirika.

https://en.sns.pirika.org/

Thanks and stay well everyone.




Part of our “haul” for the season.

 

[Sweetfancymoses]

Recently, I found this dump of paints and solvents, most of them 3/4 full, in a creekside strip of woods along the county road. The 5 gal bucket had an order # from Sherwin-Williams on it. The Conservation Officer is looking into it. Wouldn't it be nice if the perp was found and had to spend a Saturday in the 'chain gang' picking up roadside trash?

https://flic.kr/p/2kcEY72 https://www.flickr.com/photos/133956285@N05/

 

[Mnoutdoorfunguy]

Great job Sweetfancy.
I hope they find the person.
i have heard of counties and municipalities hiring full time investigators to find “dumpers”
The cost of the investigator was less than the clean up costs.

We will find tires and other large trash in the same spots year after year: undeveloped shoreline near a road, exactly as we see in your photo.
Roll the crap down the hill and drive off.

Thanks for the great work!

 

[Guest]

Tires, if they have been submerged for a while, can be a huge PITA; filled with silt and mud and heavy as hell just to pry free from the bottom, much less hoist into/carry in a canoe. (Old abandoned crab trap are worse, barnacle covered heavier and corroded wire dangerous. I carry a pair of wire nippers on coastal trips and cut gaping holes in the old abandoned traps I find washed up in the ankle deep shallows, so they are not Diamond Back Terrapin and etc killing machines. FWIW those same wire nippers do a wonderful job of cutting back Greenbriar and other thorny vines around a campsite, so double duty)

http://www.conservewildlifenj.org/bl...t-bay-estuary/

A couple decades ago some yahoo dumped, really dumped, allegedly using a dump truck, a load of old tires off a bridge into our local trout stream, the Gunpowder Falls. In the section above the reservoir that provides city drinking water.

Volunteer canoeists got them out from where they had washed downstream, but old tires later began mysteriously appearing, starting miles downstream, well between any bridge crossings. WTF?

Someone eventually sleuthed out the source. A local farmer had started a tire dump in a ravine at the back of his property. That ravine contains Somethingsomething Branch (First Mine Branch?, maybe Second Mine Branch?), a tiny rivulet 99% of the year.

But, in a sustained hard deluge, Somethingsomething Branch becomes a thundering class IV torrent. I have seen it in that condition, on a day when the Gunpowder overwashed the bridge crossings, rising 12 feet above normal in six hours. Not a day I should have been paddling the Gunpowder Falls, and by far the fastest I have ever covered 15 miles of river, or ever wish to. Young, or at least younger, and stupid.

Somethingsomething Branch was definitely do-able that day by some crazy ELF boater. Plenty of rushing whitewater to wash old tires into the Gunpowder. All because, at the time, there was a $1 a tire charge to dispose of them.

Mnoutdoorfunguy, your efforts are appreciated, and that appears to be the usual odd collection of trash.

Will Derness and I carried out a similar oddball load from a canoe camper on the Waccamaw in SC, including a couple garbage bags filled with the usual idiot detritus of empty Bud Light cans and discarded food packaging, but also an empty fire extinguisher (?) and a pretty decent office chair (??).

We were on a heavily loaded good eats, creature comforts, Glamper trip, and I really didn’t have room for a freaking office chair, but I tied it in Beverly Hillbillies style in the bow and prayed I wouldn’t come to any low-headroom sweeper logs before the take out.

I clean up that chair, put new glides on the legs and it is still in routine use in a friend’s office. Score!

Even if it is just the random Gatoraid bottles, beer cans or Styrofoam chunks floating in an eddy or lodged in a strainer pile, picking up bits of trash along the way is simply the easy/responsible thing to do. Bring a spare trash bag, especially on daytrips.

BTW, the short (5 or 6 foot) tee-grip/duck’s bill shallows push pole/hiking staff/spare tarp pole is ideal for pulling that kind of drek free without hazarding capsize in some awkward at eddy arms-length approach.

PC261477 by Mike McCrea, on Flickr

 

[gumpus]

Great work Mnoutdoorfunguy. Inspirational. I do pick up trash when paddling but I keep wanting to do better. I think I need to just decide to make some paddles dedicated to clean-up versus paddling. The efforts of just one person can make a real impact.

 

[Mnoutdoorfunguy]

Thank you very much Gumpus.
You are correct, one person can make a difference and it will be cumulative.
My wife posts photos of some of our boat-loads of trash or periodic updates of weight totals on Facebook.
From these posts, one lady now carries a trash bag in her kayak when she paddles on the lake where she lives.
Another has decided to pick up litter on her daily walks.
Those are what we know of.
Most every paddle for us is a trash haul.