Trash in the wilderness

[Justin Mckinney]

I hiked up to Emigrant lake , in the Emigrant wilderness via Kennedy Meadows trailhead. Perfect , cool , cloudy days with a great short, lightning / hail storm on the last day. Emigrant lake was as beautiful as always. I was fly fishing the bank and noticed 3 beer cans scattered around a fallen tree. The cans appear to have been there about a year maybe two . I started fishing and noticed 2 more in the lake , out of reach. I was horrified . How could someone just throw the empties in this beautiful lake ? I carried the ones out I could, along with some other trash. The question is, ” What’s the backstory to this ? ” Who does this ? The lake is a good ways in .

[W I S N E R !]

I think my personal record in the Sierra was bordering on 15# of trash, carried over ~3 days. I hauled out a large rotten tent and the decayed remains of a flannel-lined sleeping bag. Thankfully the ranger at Crabtree let me leave it with him for a future horse/mule packout.

Another good one was a massive summer sausage (~3 pounds), gnawed by rodents in the bushes of a camp. Had it for two days.

Once also chopped off the tip of my finger pulling a glass jar out of the soil. It broke as it dislodged and within seconds I had blood everywhere, two days of hiking with my hand held over my head, ended up with stitches when I got home.

I came out from an overnight this morning. The haul was one plastic bottle cap, a small piece of webbing, and a rotten mylar balloon.

Trying to curry favor with the mountain spirits isn’t always easy ;)

[Ray J]

Those cans in the lake might have flowed in.  Some years back we had some lake flooding.  Stuff washed in from tributaries but then with the lake up it was deposited in the forest.

I’ve been shocked hiking on a trail that is sort of in the city area.  The trailheads are trashed bad.  I’ve picked up stuff along the trail that people hiking/walking/running the trail have tossed down.  Worst one I saw was a guy running the trail  He had about three flask type things of water.  When I returned on my way back he also passed me on his return.  He only had ONE flask.  I picked up the other two that he’d tossed ON the trail or just next to it.  I wanted to find the guy and ask him if he thought: 1) he was in a competition and some others were going to police after him.  2) was his mom following him to pick up?

Unreal.

[Ken Larson]

This occurrence not only occurs in the Wilderness Environment,  but just take a look at the Road Side and Beach Environments. Same issue coming from the same type of insensitive behavior!

[Jerry Adams]

I always haul out trash too

Usually, in Wilderness and wilderness, I have found only a little trash.  Corner of candy bar wrapper, rubber band,…

Often there’s aluminum, rusty steel, and broken glass in a fire circle.  If there’s too much for me to carry I might have to leave it.  Rusty metal thrown in the bushes where no one will see it will slowly rust away so might be a choice.

Terrible about your finger Craig.  “No good deed goes unpunished”?

There’s a whole thread of people finding balloons in the wilderness:

https://www.oregonhikers.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=24387

People should quit releasing helium balloons in the city even if it’s therapeutic

[R L]

Whelp.  Every wilderness permit will come with a thirteen gal trash bag and a pair of chopsticks.  Back at the ranger station the trash bag will be weighed and rewarded one dollar per pound.  Yep.  Always thinkin.  ~RL

[Kevin Babione]

Fortunately, I found this only about 4 miles from the trailhead:

I used the two water bottles to wash my hands after digging two same-sized rusty cans out of the fire ring and then carried all the trash out.  I usually keep a sandwich-size ziploc in my pants pocket while hiking for small items like wrappers, bottle caps, and pole tips (yes – I’ve found two), but take a plastic shopping bag for cases like this where I have a wee bit more to carry.

Like the rest of you, it always astounds me to find trash on the trail…

[PaulW]

It saddens me a bit that I’m not at all surprised by the trash I find out in the backcountry, let alone the front country. As a matter of fact, I find myself pleasantly surprised when I DON’T find trash. Maybe we need to add LNT training to school curriculums.

I think RL’s comment may have been tongue-in-cheek, but there’s a lot of truth in it. I saw a great quote recently (can’t remember who said it) – “People follow incentives, not advice.”  When I was a kid, we scoured the neighborhood for bottles so we could collect the deposit. The little bit of  cash we collected was quite an incentive. It was rare to find any broken bottles around.

 

 

 

[Jerry Adams]

In ~1970 I remember collecting several garbage sacks of trash up Eagle Creek in the Columbia Gorge in Oregon.  I think things were much trashier then – it was common for people to leave all sorts of stuff.

LNT principals are much better now.

[R L]

Tongue-in-cheek?  Not so much.  Raised an eyebrow though, huh.  Poking the bear with a stick is how I see it.  Pains me the conversation has to exist.  Knowing right from wrong is generally achieved around age two. I’ve been a steward of the land for many moons.  Started as a young lad half dozen decades ago taking walks with Gpa.  He’d stoop to pick up a nail or whatev along the road stating, someone could get a flat, and put it in his pocket.  Then he made a game out of it.  And so on.  ~RL

[David Thomas]

I’ve got 700 feet of sandy beach which is a steep scramble away from the paved road.   The fraction of stuff that people bring back from their outing seems range from 40% to 90%, especially at night and extra especially when alcohol is involved.  Shoes and socks are most common but shirts, sweaters, chairs go down and don’t come up back up until I bring them up.

The trails up here are pretty darn clean.   Clean enough that one piece of accidently dropped is picked up by the next person along, as it should be.

The public-use cabin and bear boxes in campground have some of the annoying crap people have detailed above.  A can of beans they didn’t use but don’t want to carry out.  An empty bottle of wine they rationalize can be used as a candle holder so they leave that, too.

[Jerry Adams]

The beach of the Olympic Peninsula.  All sorts of stuff lands on the beach – from boats or washed down rivers and carried in on the tide.  It’s disgusting.

People gather the stuff into huge piles and haul it out.  I think they’re federal wildlife people – I’ve talked to such people before.

But, it’s not backpackers leaving their junk behind, although there’s a little of that too.

Actually, that’s just a characteristic of that place.  Looking out at the ocean you don’t see any of the junk.

[Alex Wallace]

Thanks for packing those beer cans out, Justin. I’ve been to that lake, and many other areas of Emigrant Wilderness, and rarely find trash like that. Mostly tangled fishing line and TP, “ew!”.

Not in Emigrant, but I did find a 4 pack of FULL unopened beers in the Ansel Adams Wilderness at a very remote lake once. Good expensive craft IPAs! The labels were mostly gone and faded so I figured it wasn’t a recent cache and took the hint. My friend and I thoroughly enjoyed them and absolutely packed out the cans.

[Marcus]

Unfortunately it is your (my) duty to remove this crap. Everything in life has gravity – cleanliness, dirtiness, safety, crime, order, disorder, peace, war, kindness…all has gravity that pulls more of itself together.

I’ve only seen people litter directly a couple times and confronted them and was a level 10 dick to them. People like this need to know they are not welcome where we (the respectful people) are. Pack your trash out or feel our collective unwelcomeness.

I have become the caretaker for a 2 mile stretch of stream near my house. in 2020 I removed close to 300 gallons of trash in 5 months. Every weekend I would collect a 13 gallon bag of cans, shirts, shoes, diapers, tampons, fruit, bottles, you name it. 2021 was a little better and I painted over 50 gallons of rock colored paint to cover grafitti.

Just last week I saw the fruits of my labor – I went on my weekly trash run and there was almost zero trash, AND someone picked up a bunch of broken glass and out it safely on a rock for me to collect! My gravity of cleanliness is starting to attract more of the same from people! This week I collected a small grocery bag of trash including a diaper, but still, since I’ve cleaned the stream religiously the amount of trash has gone down by 80+%, showing that 1 person can make a difference.

Might not seem like much to carry out 5 beer cans, but it undeniably makes a difference in how other people act.

[Justin Mckinney]

I had a fantastic 5 night trip in the Emigrant wilderness. I’m happy that I did not encounter much trash ! I did find a horrible site at upper Twin lake. I based camped at Black Bear lake , which was so beautiful !!! I day hiked to upper Twin Lake in Yosemite national park. I had the place to myself, fly fishing for beautiful rainbow trout. I saw a large white mass near the shoreline , in some Hemlock trees. Someone, had taken a large number 2 , right on the plants , not a few feet from the shoreline of this pristine lake. They had wiped themselves , dumped the toilet paper on top, along with some sanitary wipes , and just to make it worse, left the empty plastic sanitary wipe package there too. I had to dig a cat hole , and dispose of this mess properly, all the while mumbling how we don’t deserve this beautiful planet.

[AK Granola]

[Dan]

People who go into the wilderness with outfitters often bring a lot of heavy crap like canned items, and they are also not really immersed in the wilderness ethos, IMO.

[Scott Smith]

Agree…while factually correct, the sign will have virtually zero effect, on those “ jerks”

 

[Brian H]

I tend to think positive thoughts about other hikers before the negative ones creep in my brain.  When I see trash in the wild, my reaction now is that maybe it fell out of someones pocket or pack, maybe during a storm the trash blew from their site, or maybe sometimes stuff just happens, right?

As conscious as I am as a hiker and MTB’r, I KNOW that occasionally over decades of being in the outdoors that trash has left my pack or pockets and ended up on the ground.  Not something I’m proud of but I know it has happened.

Just recently on a section hike of the Tahoe PCT, the only water source close by was a mosquito infested alcove deep in bushes with a small trickle of water.  I had to hunch down almost on my knees to crawl 6-8 feet through this bug infested vegetative “tunnel” to fill a bottle.  A few miles later I realized that a small bag of dried fruit that I had in one of my pockets must have fallen out during that water grab.  The next hiker who got water at that source and saw “trash” probably thought that some A-hole just straight up littered.

I tend to carry a single glove and ziplock bag now on all my day hikes and rides.  If I see trash, including covid mask, I pick it up and bag it.  Good karma goes all around.

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