Lend a hand
Celebrate National Public Lands Day by helping to clean man’s self-made mess
Help clean up the mess on National Public Lands Day
The Open Space division of the City of Albuquerque’s Parks and Recreation Department is celebrating National Public Lands Day by hosting a cleanup of the south end of Foothills Open Space on Sept 29. Members of the public are invited to help remove trash from a 20- to 30-acre section of land and clean up graffiti that is on some of the boulders in the area.
“This spot is not used as much as other areas under our jurisdiction, but it’s been a while since we’ve cleaned it up,” said Open Space’s Bosque Forestry Specialist Erik Zsemlye. “It’s designated for hiking, biking and horseback riding.”
National Public Lands Day, a project of the National Environmental Education Foundation, is the nation’s largest, single-day volunteer event for public lands. NPLD began in 1994 with three sites and 700 volunteers. A list of projects for NPLD is available at publiclandsday.org.
According to the National Public Lands Day website, more than 170,000 volunteers worked at 2,067 sites in every state, the District of Columbia and in many U.S. territories during the event in 2011. They collected an estimated 23,000 pounds of invasive plants, built and maintained an estimated 1,500 miles of trails, planted an estimated
100,000 trees, shrubs and other native plants and removed an estimated 500 tons of trash from trails and other places.
“There is a buildup of trash at the Foothills Open Space site,” Zsemlye said. “One of the reasons we want to get rid of the graffiti is that it’s on rocks that can be seen from I-40. Getting rid of graffiti is difficult. It’s important to find the right cleaning mixture that can make the graffiti less noticeable and not hurt the surrounding plants.”
The cleanup begins at 9 a.m. at the south end of trail 365 on Camino de la Sierra NE. Light refreshments are provided to all volunteers. Garbage bags are also provided, although organizers ask that volunteers bring their own gloves, water and sunscreen. Everyone is given a raffle number and is eligible to win an assortment of prizes from REI.
“We’ll have a trash compactor on site,” Zsemlye said. “We’ll also be sorting recyclables.”
A group of volunteers who have already signed on to the project are members of Albuquerque’s geocaching community. Geocachers are modernday treasure hunters who use global positioning units to find boxes and other items that have been hidden by geocachers in locations around the world. When geocachers find a cache, they take something from it and leave something of their own behind. There are a number of caches hidden in the Foothills Open Space area.
“This is a good opportunity for people who want to learn about geocaching to get some tips from the experienced geocachers who will be helping us out with the clean up,” he said. National Public Lands Day is one of many opportunities for volunteers who want to help preserve and maintain public lands in the Albuquerque area. While trash is a problem in open space areas, Zsemlye says resource degradation, often in the forms of illicit off-road vehicle use and graffiti, is the biggest problem.
The city’s Open Space division manages 30,000 acres of public open space that include remote lands within the East Mountains, areas that border an urban environment and culturally significant sites. Within most sections are many miles of trails.
“We have 125 active Trail Watch volunteers who contribute 25 hours of time to us annually,” Zsemlye said. “They are the eyes and ears of our open spaces.”
Currently 18 individuals, organizations and businesses have adopted a section of an open space or a trail. As part of this Adopt-an-Open Space program, each adopting entity organizes one service project a year that can include trash removal, trail maintenance and invasive plant removal.