Eight club members, John & Lois, Mike & Barb, Marv & Marlene, Tracie, Danny, and a guest, Ed Shankland, gathered at Peterson to give the river one last cleaning before cold weather set in. The last few times we have cleaned the Pine we found very little trash. This section, Peterson to Low Bridge, yielded more stuff. It was interesting because there wasn’t a lot of trash scattered about, but we found “mother lodes” in eddies and log jams. Several interesting pieces were picked up. Marlene got a waterproof camera, Danny found a fishing rod and reel, Ed found a plastic milk crate he will use on future cleanups, and Lois found a beer cozy that shows why the river needs to be cleaned.
We filled five large bags with assorted trash, plus Ed pulled out about ten pieces of lumber that had huge spikes sticking out ready to stab boats or bodies. Check out Ed’s canoe going through Pin Ball rapid in the photos below. The trash filled the bottom of his canoe, and the lumber was stacked on top of the gunwales. There was no room for a bow paddler.
We had a little humor. Early in the day Ed was crawling down a bank head first to get a can, and he tumbled head first into the water! We pulled a number of large liquor bottles out of the river. They all had a little liquor in them, but were mostly empty. We speculated that they were all in the river because of a capsize (No one throws out a bottle that still has liquor in it.), but they capsized because they had placed most of the bottles contents in their bodies. The river should be good until next spring.
Photos and report by John Heiam