For the second year in a row, ForestWatch lead a team of volunteers to clean up trash along West Cuesta Ridge as part of the San Luis Obispo County Creeks to Coast Cleanup (formerly Coastal Cleanup Day) on September 21 organized by our friends at ECOSLO. We were joined by students from Cuesta College and Cal Poly as well as residents from around the area.
West Cuesta Ridge is one of the most popular recreation areas in the San Luis Obispo area. While it gets a lot of love, sometimes it gets a little too much. Each year we remove hundreds of pounds of trash from along the road and trails on the ridge. This year was no different.
Our team split into multiple groups that focused on various areas in the area, including the Cuesta Ridge Botanical Area—a specially-protected place due to the many unique and endemic species that occur there such as Sargent cypress.
Altogether the group remove over 330 pounds of trash from West Cuesta Ridge, including tires, bottles, broken glass, abandoned camping gear, and even a mangled laptop. Approximately 60 pounds of what was collected was recycled.
Thank you to all of the amazing volunteers who joined us for the event and to ECOSLO and other partners for continuing to make the cleanup bigger and better. We were excited to learn that our efforts contributed to the removal of over 16,000 pounds of trash from around the county that day! We’d also like to thank our photography intern, Dan Lambert, who was instrumental in organizing our volunteer team and documenting the event.
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