Annual cleanup set for April 1 at DeGray Lake
DEGRAY LAKE — As part of the Great American Cleanup held each year from March through May, DeGray Lake Resort State Park will once again host its annual Shoreline Sweep Cleanup from 9 a.m. to noon on April 1.
Participants in the annual event, where groups of volunteers help clean up the 14 miles of the state park’s shoreline, will get a free lunch and a chance to win one of several door prizes.
“We try to entice people, I guess a little bit, as well,” David Armstrong, a park interpreter at the state park, said.
“(We) encourage them, so to speak, by providing a lunch afterwards, and just for some fun, additional camaraderie and community event, we’ll have a few door prizes that will be raffling off at the end of the cleanup, somewhat similar to how we’ve done the one in the fall for years.”
Armstrong said many people confuse the spring cleanup with the annual fall cleanup hosted by the nonprofit organization Keeping DeGray Lake Beautiful. That event, which will be celebrating its 45th annual cleanup, will be held on Sept. 23 and focuses on the entire 207 miles of the lake’s shoreline.
“This is one that we started up a few years back kind of as part of the Great American Cleanup initiative,” he said. “The fall one is the Great Arkansas Cleanup. … (Arkansas) State Parks kind of made an additional push to try to do additional cleanups in the spring, so this is ours that specifically just targets the shoreline along the state park, on the north shore.”
The goal of the event is to make sure debris does not harm the environment.
“It’s as simple as trying to remove litter that unfortunately makes its way into the lake by a variety of means, and what happens is that stuff that ends up in the lake will float out to the shoreline and often get kind of funneled back into coves and places that are a little harder to get to but still very visible,” Armstrong said.
“Whether they’re visible or not, all that plastic and things, all of those that break down, definitely have a detrimental impact to the environment. So the shoreline tactic is to kind of walk the shoreline and look for that most recent high-water mark, and you can always find it by all the other debris as well as trash that’s laid up in places, and then we just walk that high-water mark and try to pick up any and all litter that we find,” he said.
“Anything that’s not natural doesn’t belong out there, we want to haul it out.”
While younger participants might be assigned to easier areas along the shore, Armstrong said participants of all ages are encouraged to help.
“It’s definitely open to all ages,” he said. “We just offer
the caveat that some areas will be a little bit more technical and require some extra precaution navigating from rocky shoreline (and) loose ground. What we’ll do is we’ll be kind of splitting up the 14 miles, and we’ll see how many folks we have registered beforehand, and that will kind of give us an idea of how many different areas to split it up into.”
He said those with smaller children “are more than welcome to come, and we will kind of assign them the easier areas of the park, and then young, wild adults that want to have a challenge, we can send them to the more technical areas.”
Those interested in participating are encouraged to preregister by calling 501-865-5801. Volunteers will meet at Pavilion 2 in the Caddo Bend Day Use Area.
“We’re not going to send anybody away,” Armstrong said. “It’s more just a request to kind of have a better idea of how much food and other supplies we’d have on hand just so we didn’t come up too short or end up with waste.”
Armstrong noted that in case of severe weather, the event would be canceled, but “if it’s just a light sprinkling kind of mist,” it would likely proceed.