River shoreline cleanup Saturday at Strathcona Island Park

Hatters will be cleaning up the shore of the South Saskatchewan River Saturday.

Grasslands Naturalists is holding Medicine Hat’s edition of the Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup at the Strathcona Island Park starting at 9 a.m.

“Volunteers from the Canadian Grasslands Naturalists are going to be meeting at the pavilion parking lot to do the 2017 Canadian Shoreline Cleanup,” said Grasslands president Hugh Armstrong, who’s lived in Medicine Hat for six years.

The cleanup will go from the Heritage Pavilion to as far as they can go along the edge of the river.

This is the local group’s fifth time doing the cleanup.

“It’s one of the volunteer projects we do every year,” said Armstrong.

In the past, the group has many strange objects in the river.

“Bicycles, lots and lots of tires, old wooden shelving (and) tons of garbage, of course,” Armstrong listed.

“Lots of stuff gets shoved down there and then a lot of it comes down river in the spring when the river’s higher and pushing stuff down.

“Basically, you can find just about anything you can imagine,” he said, estimating that they pick up about 600 pounds of trash every year.

They leave the garbage at the pavilion’s dumpsters, which the city then picks up.