Amber
Registered: March 2007
Posts: 5
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See the picture? See that hand? Yeah, that’s mine. Notice I’m lacking a glove?
Let me start from the beginning.
My school requires a minimum of ninety (ninety! As in nine-zero!) hours of community service by the end of ninth grade. It’s not that I don’t like community service or anything—because I do!—but I never have the time. My weekends are packed full and so are my weekdays. Not to mention all the homework I’m given. Ag.
But whenever I get a chance, I like to help out, you know? So what better way to help then cleaning up while doing one of my favorite things; hiking! My dad, my brother, my dad’s friend (girlfriend, whatever, I said it), Tate the dog and I headed to Wallace Falls—a perfect family-used hike up in the Cascade Mountains.
We hiked the two miles to the top—finding out that we were more fit then we thought—and ate snacks, putting the first trash into my small, clear, plastic bag. On the way down, we agreed to pick up trash.
…The thing is, Washington’s hikes are pretty darn clean.
Besides the picnic area where I snagged my biggest catch, a Cheeto bag, I ended up with a grand total of
-Five snack wrappers (from us)
-One Cheeto bag
-Seven cigarettes
-Plastic twist thingy from the top of a water bottle
-A small water bottle
-Some disgusting napkins (Ug. Gross. Gag.)
That’s it. And did you see the disgusting napkin part? My Dad was SUPPOSED to have packed my gloves but he forgot.
Forgot!!!
So I picked up trash like how you pick up dog doo—using the outside of the bag as a ‘glove’ and pulling trash inside. Very awkward.
On our way back down my nice, full, plastic bag ripped on a branch. The trash spilled out across the trail! Quickly I gathered it back up and, holding the bag closed with one hand and collecting trash with the other.
A comical (ha-ha-ha) picture of me holding the trash is posted above this.
So that’s it. But it’s the thought that counts, right? I mean, it’s a GOOD thing that the trail was clean and all I could find was a few trash things.
It was a great hike (even if I had to wash my hands a million times once I got home).
-Amber (4.17.2007)
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