A Northampton County Park (26-Oct-2016)

For our last clean-up of the day, I took Leigh Ann to a park not far from the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation Area that she had never been to before. The park is part of the Northampton County Parks System, I am not giving the name or location because it is not well known and in many cases the more people that know about a place the worse it gets as far as trash goes. 

Before starting down the access road we cleaned up a small ditch by the roadside. This we just piled next to the car to be sorted with the other trash at the end of the hike.

There are two ponds at this park, only one has trails that go all the way around it. This is the smaller of the two and what a nice view. We then took the trails around the larger of the ponds. 

Most of what were were picking up was the normal trailside trash, bottles and cans, and some bait containers. 

Then we got to this. Someone had made a considerably large fort and had abandoned it. There were three main piles of garbage. One in the back of the photo where the actual fort was, one on top of the fire ring in the middle and one in the very front of the photo that was partially covered by leafs. The fort was collapsed and everything looked like it had been there for some time. We pulled some very odd items out of the piles and luckily found a large trash bag too. 

We couldn't make sense of the items that were around. It could have possibly been a kids fort and they just randomly took things from home or it could have been a homeless persons collection of things. In any case it didn't look like anyone would be back for them and they don't belong in this park.

"Cowabunga Dude" Leigh Ann posing with one of the oddities found in the collapsed fort. 

The collection of items really didn't make any sense what so ever. There weren't any alcohol containers or the normal food stuff wrappers that would normally be found around a camp. I just don't know what to think.

We bagged up just about everything except for bedding that was piled on the fire ring and left in the fort. It was really a lot of trash. Had we had more time we would have gone back and bagged up and taken out the rest. With this and everything we already collected we had everything we could carry at the time. From this photo the clay dog and stack of paper were left behind. The paper will biodegrade and the clay really has no impact on the surrounding environment. 

This is what we had to leave. The next time I am in the area I will return to remove this stuff. Hopefully someone else will before I get to it, but I doubt that is likely. 

This was everything from this stop. We were left with a slight issue though. With all of the recyclables from the other stops we didn't have enough room for all of it in the car. We had to leave a bag of recyclables near the pull off and we took the trash from this site to another nearby Northampton County Park that does have a dumpster. After the trash was disposed of we went back and collected the recyclables. For the day we collected a lot of trash. Thanks Leigh Ann for suggesting the first two sites of the day and for coming along! It is always fun working with you! 
You too can help with taking out the trash! If you get out hiking take a grocery bag with you, give it a second use and fill it with trash while you are out! Every bit helps. You can also help contributing to this project here: Help Fund Taking Out the Trash

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