Walk to Ole Olson Park

About 2 miles north from downtown Minneapolis is Ole Olson Park, a small park of only a couple of acres. The Park and Rec path from downtown dead ends here just before the railroad bridge. There is a lot of trash to be picked up here. Maybe I'll walk back up here in March to work on it.  We noticed the slope going down to the river was bare.  Friends of the Mississippi is working with Park and Rec to remove invasive species and restore the slope to dry savanna.  The details of that project can be found here:  https://www.minneapolisparks.org/_asset/y5ssr0/orvin_ole_olson_park_fmr_factsheet.pdf

Now that the slope has been cleared you can see that it's a graffiti playground under the BNSF Railroad Bridge.  It was so bright yesterday morning and the shadows so intense, it was a challenge to take photos. By the afternoon it was in the high 50's.  Not normal for February in Minnesota.

Leftovers from the party.  Nice shoe.

Freshly done? The graffiti here is mostly stylized lettering and while I have little appreciation for that I do like the color combination here.

If I were going to go back to clean the litter in this area, my policy to still to leave homeless camps alone.

Here is where I have a problem though.  This is a closeup of a burn pile for removing the insulation from copper wire.  There were several burn piles here.  Whether or not this stuff was obtained legally or not, you don't burn it. It's illegal and we don't need these toxins released into the air or the river.  

http://www.scrapmetaljunkie.com/873/burning-wire-illegal

Ok, enough whining and time to start the walk back home.

Starting the New Year

It's time to start some trash clean up.  It's still winter technically but I can feel spring is just around the corner. I was out a couple times during the past week.  I took a survey of my mile from the Hennepin Avenue Bridge to the Plymouth Bridge.  Yes, somebody has been under the bridge drinking so I picked that junk up.

This is new.  Someone is storing their stuff along the river.  Neat as a pin.  Hope the spring floods don't wash all that stuff down river. 

Here's a sight I've seen a half dozen times before in this exact location.  Whole Foods bag, whole roasted chicken tray.  Yum. A picnic.  The receipt says that you also enjoyed barbecue potato chips.  I love barbecue potato chips especially with a Dr. Pepper but I don't leave my trash after I finish consuming them. 

That snag I was working on last fall has all sorts of new stuff that is stuck there.  See you next fall when the water level is lower.

Bassett Creek is looking nice.  I can see that there is some trash that is frozen into the ice.  I expected that.

I saw a nice clean bag from Bobby and Steve's Auto World hanging from a shrub so I used it to pick up some stuff.  While I use many bags that I find to pick up trash I usually bring a few from home, ones that I mostly get from Target.  Some city council members are proposing a single-use plastic bag ban because they screw up the recycling sorting machines.  We have one sort recycling in Minneapolis so we don't have to separate our recyclables by type but I guess those plastic bags are a problem.  According to a recent article in The Journal (journalmpls.com) there are more than 160 cities in the US who have already done this.  I wonder if the guy who loves the Whole Foods chicken would pay extra for the paper bag.