Three days of trash

My favorite walk (and most frequent) along the Mississippi River starts at the Hennepin Avenue bridge.  I usually take a quick look under the bridge first even though it's not park property.  I find it disturbing when there is children's stuff there.  I asked the police once if they ever patrol that area at night and they said there is so much going on downtown they don't have time to do it.  From the bridge I go north along the river.

The next area I come to is the little beach area with the concrete steps going down to the water.  There are a lot of folks who come down there to eat lunch, meditate, exercise, and fish.  (Yes, that's a broken fishing pole there).  When I was there this week After the Falls Kayak guys were taking their boats out at that site.  One of those guys told me that they pick up trash out of the river when they can.

A little further upstream is the Bassett Creek area.  This junk was collected along the path that goes around the creek. There are a lot of folks who use this path for a morning run or a quick escape at noon from work in downtown.  In general even though there was a lot of trash this week I feel that this stretch of park land is cleaner.  That is giving me time to look at the areas that are now visible along the shoreline.  There is one spot that I can now get to (haven't yet) that has a blue tarp, back pack, jackets, water skis, snow jacket all tangled in drift wood along the beach.  I could have a garage sale.

In the news this week there was a clean up group that picked up 5 tons of trash along the river somewhere between St. Paul and Minneapolis.

http://bringmethenews.com/2015/06/17/1-mile-of-mississippi-river-2-5-hours-of-time-5-tons-of-trash/