Somehow, I managed to con a few people from one of my classes to help me clean up the American River Parkway. After a few hurdles, I was able to get 3 of them to join me today for 3 hours to pick up trash. We started at 0930 at El Manto. To my surprise, the entire area from the parking lot at El Manto all the way down to Ancil Hoffman was relatively clean. The four of us managed to pick up a total of 23lbs of trash. I expected MUCH more! We walked most of the trails and the waterline the entire way picking up any garbage we could find. On the way back, we walked the bike trail collecting anything on the way back to the vehicles. After a quick break and some snacks, I had the group follow me to Paradise Beach in hopes of finding some more trash. JACKPOT!!! The entire area down there was covered in trash. We picked up many bottles, cans, bags, wrappers and large rug. All in all we spent 3 hours actively picking up trash and when we got back to the vehicles we weighed all the bags. The total was 112lbs of garbage that we removed from the parkway in just a few hours. Glad to have left the river and the parkway a little cleaner than it was this morning! If everyone could just pick up a pocketfull of trash every time they were out fishing, we would have a much cleaner river to enjoy!
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