I had a great Mother’s Day and I hope all other mamas did, too. It started out pretty lazy which is just how I want a Mother’s Day to be But, I decided in the afternoon that I was feeling up to a walk and everyone would come with me. And my oldest said “can we go to the river?” I turned her down at first and then I got to thinking. Why not?
We stopped at Dollar Tree for bags and grabbers first. Then we headed to Chrissie Caughlin Park that is one of several in our area sitting right on the Truckee River. As soon as we got there and filed out of the car we were greeted by several pieces of trash by our parking space. There was even a half used case of water bottles that we didn’t pick up because we weren’t sure it wasn’t still being used by someone. (I would be curious to see if it is still there today.)
The park is one of many that connect on a bicycle trail leading into downtown Reno. Knowing this we decided to follow the trail upstream hoping to reach Dorotkstar Park. (I have no earthly idea how to say that name.) We did not reach that park but we did go about a mile.
Needless to say we found plenty of trash from bottles, to plastic confetti, to a fishing lure with a hook still in it, broken bottles and more. When we came back to the main park we had started at there were already more pieces of litter to be cleaned!
A couple people noticed what we were doing and thanked us for the efforts. We always appreciate the smiles and the thanks.
I learned the inexpensive grabbers from the dollar store are not a worth-while investment. We lost two of the four due to breaking pieces off which makes them not an economic nor environmentally viable option.
We uploaded a few pictures of trash to openlittermap.com to contribute to litter mapping and documented (later) on CleanSwell app.
All in all it was a great Mother’s Day!