Clean-up

Yesterday I spent my morning hiking through overgrown Manzanita bushes, on paths that were never intended to be walked on by humans. The area I was in is just a stones throw away from Temecula. In fact you can even see Old Town Temecula from one of the spots I was at. This area however is completely remote in the middle of De Luz, no real houses near-by, and yet somehow it was littered with trash. That brings me to the reason I was there. To cover a group of volunteers do an annual trash removal. The area I was at was just a small portion of the area involved in the clean-up. It encompassed the entire 26.2-mile Rancho Santa Margarita watershed, and yet in this huge expanse of wild area dotted with orchards and ranches, the organizers expected to collect over 10 tons of trash.



I am always amazed at how inconsiderate people can be, and when I got to the site I wasn't let down. I found the volunteers hiking through a dried up waterfall pulling out broken remnants of old televisions, pulling beer bottle after beer bottle from the soil, and placing it all on to a abandoned couch. It turns out the road at the top of the hill is a favorite hang-out for teens to get drunk at, and after a few what could be more fun than a good old game of "Let throw stuff off the edge of this cliff and see what happens". Well the good news is the volunteers pulled out a good portion of what was there, and they will be back again next year to do the same. Hopefully with less work to do.