February 2002 - Indian Springs Cleanup
Trail Rating - 3.0
Trip Leader: Paul Nicholson
Photos submitted by Chris Villarreal
Usually the Arizona Rough Riders run two cleanup runs a year in the Cave Creek Ranger District on Trail 404 (Spare Tire Canyon), however the last run down 404 was pretty easy with no real trash to pick up. So this year we decided to hit a new area. We chose Trail 532, also known as Indian Springs Wash. This trail is a popular trail for just about any type of vehicle to get back into the wilderness. It is passable by a 2wd vehicle, and as a result it seems to be a popular spot for people to go to party. This area was also mentioned in a newspaper article earlier in the week, you can read the article here. I tried contacting the person who wrote that article and invited them to ride along with us on the cleanup run. Nobody got back with me, which was kind of disappointing since the general public will only get to see one side of this story.
I believe we had 12 vehicles on the run. Paul and myself arrived around 8:30. I had arranged for us to borrow some trash pickers and garbage bags from the Ranger Station last month and we picked those up early and started to clean up the parking lot while we waited for everyone else to filter in. When we left at 9:15am we had about 4 full bags of trash from the parking lot.
We continued our cleanup on Trail 532. The most picked up item was beer cans (surprised?). Maybe we need to push for an anti-littering ad campaign from the beer company's? We spent about an hour and a half picking up on the way in to the first little play area. I drove up the hill pictured above to pick up a sign tat was visible on the hillside. I noticed some cans up past the sign so continued up the hill and started picking up trash.
People are so lazy. Here's a picture of the brush at the top of the hill from the trail. Walk around behind it and you can see the bag of trash (how hard is it to put the bag in the bag of your vehicle)? Some other notable things we found: 1 twelve pack of Keystone Light piled under some empty Keystone Light boxes, a "Help Wanted" sign for Domino's Pizza, an old Catback muffler, an unopened gallon of water, a stack of unused styrofoam cups and did I mention several hundred beer cans?
Some of the play hills in the area.
About noon Paul set up the grill and started cooking brats and hot dogs, he promised to pull out the lobster after we cleaned up the next area :)
After lunch we continued picking up trash up till the 1104/532 junction. Shooting is now prohibited out in this ranger district and I can easily see why. In one small area we found enough cans and shot up targets to fill up two garbage bags.