At 9am on a sunny Saturday morning, a brave group of 15 ForestWatch volunteers bumped down a dirt road towards a popular target shooting destination in the hills above Goleta. What they found was a dumpsite. Brass and lead ammunition, along with shattered glass and shredded beer cans littered the dirt. A refrigerator, a washing machine, and even an old piano lay among numerous other articles, which were shot to shrapnel.
Image Courtesy Grace Carey
The team was unfazed and set to work collecting hundreds of pounds of trash from the area. In the end, they filled two truckloads with debris, and gathered truckloads more for extraction by the Forest Service at a later date.
Image Courtesy Grace Carey
Image Courtesy Grace Carey
Image Courtesy Tanner Yould
With 105 more volunteer hours logged during the event and hundreds more pounds of trash removed from our forest, we want to give a big thank you to our volunteers for all their tireless hard work, and to UCSB’s Coastal Fund for sponsoring and supporting Los Padres ForestWatch’s 2014 volunteer projects.
Since 2007, ForestWatch volunteers have worked nearly every corner of the Los Padres National Forest, protecting watersheds and wildlife. For more information about ForestWatch’s volunteer projects or to get involved, visit LPFW.org/volunteer.
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