To celebrate Giving Tuesday this year we teamed up with Parks Project on a morning clean up run. This original blog was published by Parks Project and written by Gretchen Braulick.

We started the hike at the Los Leones Canyon trailhead right outside of LA. The run lasted about an hour and a half, hiking 1.5 miles up and running 1.5 miles down. During that time, we would stop to pick up any trash we found on the trail. This included discarded clothes, soda cups, and many plastic water bottles. Once arriving at the lookout area of the trail we came upon the most amount of trash, ending our hike with 5 clean up bags full of trash and 1 of recycling.

It’s all about these ‘feel good’ moments when we can benefit from our clean up on these local trails and support the Parks Project mission by leaving the parks better than we found them.There’s so many ways to get out in your community and take care of the land we’re on whether it’s a local park or a national. When we reached the top of the trailhead where the lookout point was located, we had some comments made to us similar to, “we didn’t even notice there was trash on the trail”, it wasn’t until after they saw us picking up the trash that they began to notice how much there really was. One person even started to pick up trash themselves.

A few small ways to minimise the trash we find on the trails:

  1. Use a reusable water bottle like this one from the Parks Project site.
  2. Bring along a clean up bag in your pack next time you take a walk
  3. Be a part of the influence, the more others see us actively caring, the more the rest of the world may want to take action.

“Thanks so much to the team at HER Trails for helping us continue to make these changes and momentums possible. Let’s continue this mission as we step into a new year!”

 

 

Stay tuned for more collaborations with the team at Parks Project!! Subscribe to our email list here to be the first to hear about upcoming events.