High Life

I was planting native plants with a volunteer work group of about 30 people a week or so ago at Mill Ruins Park along the Mississippi River.  As we were getting started one of the coordinators of the group asked if anyone knew what is the primary thing that pollutes the river.  I thought to myself that surely I must know the answer to this.  Pop quiz.  I hate pop quizzes.  A few of us shouted out answers.  My response was pet waste.  I knew it wasn't right when I said it.  Finally someone from the Dept of Natural Resources said stormwater runoff.  Ack! I know this.  Of course I know this. The term dumb bunny crept into my mind.  The reason we are replacing invasive species like crown vetch with native plants along the river is because those native species with their very deep root systems are better at filtering out pollutants from runoff.  At the end of our volunteer morning we emptied our purple plastic bags full of vetch into a compost area.  The coordinator used the word resource to refer to those plastic bags.  Why not use those bags again until they are unusable?  I was hoping that the group would also work on litter pick up but we didn't have time for that.

A few days later I was off to clean up some litter on my own with my new litter grabber that one of the Mill Ruin work group coordinators had given me.  I had been watching a number of homeless folks over the last month or so who had been living under the Hennepin Bridge.  I happened to be on the bike ramp looking over the railing at a pile of buttons in the weeds.  They were blue and green plastic buttons with a note that said 'butts for buttons".  I don't even know what that means and I'm afraid to google it.  My camera lens had broken and I was getting a grinding noise and blurry pictures so no photo to be had.  Just then a couple walked by and started heading for the homemade cardboard house up in the rafters of the bridge. They are not the first people I've notice temporarily living there over the last few years. The flat concrete area suitable for sleeping is about 25ft up a stone wall and I had been wondering how folks get up there.  I had convinced myself that they dropped down from above and swung around a wire grate, but no, I watched the couple quickly and athletically scale the wall.  When the guy noticed that I was watching he shouted out to me "the police know we're here and sometimes they bring us lunch".  I responded with something like "I'm just watching you climb that wall and am amazed at how you got yourself up there so fast.".  So a few comments back and forth and I told him if you see me around I'm just picking up litter around the river.  He said they try to clean up their litter.  That couple is gone now as is their cardboard house and I give them a B minus on their cleanup effort. I picked up a little trash under the bridge, not everything, but I wondered what happened to them.

Another couple of guys had been also living nearby under the same bridge but on a concrete slab right next to the bike/walking path.  Out in plain sight, horribly uncomfortable, an all around bad place to sleep at night.  Those folks are gone too.  Litter left behind. I am just the observer and cleanup crew, but D minus for you guys.  So I looked over the railing to see if the third camp right along the water was gone too.  Yes, gone and a big bag of litter was wedged into the rocks below. Good job just not finished. I hopped over the railing and dragged it up.  I spent about 1/2 an hour picking up stuff and left it all by the park and rec trash barrel.  There is more to do but instead I wanted to walk up river a bit.  I wondered what happened to everyone and then I got to thinking about something that I'd seen on Facebook from Samantha Pree, one of the candidates for city council.  Basically she wondered if police were evicting homeless from places that would be embarrassing to the city as we get ready to be hosts for the Super Bowl this winter.  But that seems like a long way off.  But maybe that is exactly what is happening.

Further up the river I returned to work in the woods next to the kid's area at the James Rice Playground.  This was my second time in the last month working that set of woods.  A rough estimate is that I found about 60 quart bottles of Miller High Life (they weren't all empty) and another 40 quart bottles of gin.  Most were under vines that I had to trample down to reach.  I was glad to have my new litter grabbler.  Resources, not just litter.

In the Water

There are some interesting things in the water between the Hennepin Bridge and the Third Avenue Bridge.

The old Hennepin Steel Arch Bridge over the Mississippi was demolished 25 years ago.  I can't say that I remember this event and I don't know how they demolished it or what was done with it but probably some of what I see in the river is left over from that event.  Does it matter that it is in the river or should it be cleaned up?  If it is steel, does it have some value to be recycled?  Does it harm anything to just leave it be?

The fish don't seem to mind.

I think that is a lid from a Park and Rec trash barrel

Missing Park bench?  Yes, definitely.

The shoreline in this area still needs to be cleaned up.  It is a thirty foot drop from the top of the retaining wall.  There is absolutely no way to get down there without either a canoe or an industrial ladder.  Get on it City of Minneapolis!  This is a prime tourist walking area.

Ganesh is Gone

The first thing I noticed this morning when I started my walk was that the corner by the Post Office on Hennepin and First St. now has a trash can.  I wrote about that spot on a prior blog and I expect that it may be just a happy bit of coincidence or maybe someone actually read what I wrote.  Either way, I am grateful. The area around the bus stop was noticeably cleaner.  I looked in the trash can and saw it had about a foot of trash.  We'll see over the next few weeks if that corner stays cleaner.  I was on vacation all last week and eating too much at the breakfast buffet so I really needed to walk a little longer today.  I grabbed about three bags of trash at Bassett Creek.  I tried to pry loose the car tire that is stuck in the mud down there.  Not going to happen.  I'm not sure what I would do with it anyway.  Later I went back under the Hennepin Bridge to finish what I had started there.  The water levels are low but I still had to hop over some open water spots along the wall to get under the bridge.  There was the usual litter plus a pink statue of the Hindu god Ganesh.  I thought I would keep it so I laid it very carefully on the top of my bag.  (My camera was home because the battery was dead.)  When I hopped across the rocks to the other side Ganesh was gone.  I guess he jumped out and went back under the bridge.

End of the Season

Pondering the last six months of trash picking.

   Love nature, get some exercise, soak up the vitamin D.

See something fun.

See something unfortunate.

Look a little closer at things.

Watch water levels change.

Reaching a goal.

And finally, finding another giant litter snag.

Can I get to that before winter?  Absolutely!  

The Journey of the Blue Barrel

A few weeks ago I was down on the beach opposite the Post Office and south of the Hennepin Avenue Bridge and I noticed this blue barrel that was wedged in some tree debris.  I was not going to try to bring it up.  A few days later we had a pretty good storm.

The next day I noticed a blue barrel upstream on the north side of the Hennepin Avenue Bridge.  I walked back to the Post Office beach where I saw the first barrel.  Not there.  Ok, it's the same barrel and the wind just moved it against the current.  The power of wind and water.

No, I didn't swim out after it.  It eventually made its way to the beach where other trash floated in as well. It's plastic so no wonder it floated upstream so easily.

I left it in the corner at First Bridge Beach.  Days later when I looked for it people had started using it as a makeshift trash can.  This just confirms my thoughts that we need more trash cans. 

Today I was back over there.  Blue barrel is still in the corner but what you really notice is how the water level is going down. (Compare it to my second photo!)  The area under the Hennepin Bridge is now accessible to me.  The water along the wall is about 2 inches deep and it doesn't take much effort to hop across the rocks that have been exposed.  This was one of those areas that bugged me to no end last spring when I started my obsessive trash cleaning.  I thought I would need a canoe or a rope ladder. Who knew that I just needed to be patient and let nature do its thing.  I hauled out a couple bags of trash but that's not even half of what's there.  There was the usual stuff plus a fishing pole and a Virgin Mary picture frame.  Now that the water is really low you can see that there is a lot of old metal junk laying in the water.  What got dumped here?  I wonder how much of the Mississippi River in other states is like this?

Over the Fence Part 3

I'm still working the area along the river by the Post Office.  One more bag would probably get this area relatively clean.  Now, it's a lot of small stuff like bottle caps and small bits of plastic junk (the kind that birds like to eat.).  A lot of the litter down here I'm sure has washed up from communities further upstream, but not all of it.  Even though you have to crawl over the guard rail to get down here, people do and they leave their stuff.  Up top there is no trash can.  There are ones further upstream and downstream but just far enough to make it a little inconvenient.  I realize that every additional trash can placed in the city adds to the expense because it's just more labor to empty them.  Sometimes though you just have to have additional cans or at least better placement of the cans they already have.  One spot that really bugs me is the corner of Hennepin and First St.  That is the north corner of the Post Office.  There is a bus stop there.  There is no trash can.

I walk by here to get to the river and the shrubs are constantly littered with trash. Occasionally I pick it up. There are usually liquor bottles in the one corner so I'm pretty sure that someone is finding this to be a convenient place to party.  Honestly, I don't know if this is the responsibility of the Post Office or the City of Minneapolis.  Directly across the street is another government building, the Federal Reserve Bank. There is a bus stop on their corner.  There are two trash cans.  Their grounds in front are one of the most well tended and beautiful in all of downtown.  

Over the Fence Part II

Last spring I went over the guard rail to this little area between the Hennepin Bridge and the Third Avenue Bridge. In the spring part of it was still underwater so I couldn't work on the far end.  There's a blue barrel over to the left pinned into the corner of tree debris.  That will probably be there until someone shoves it back out into the river and it makes its way into the lock and dam.

                   

That's the old Post Office up there on the other side of the guard rail.  Once you're over the fence there is a little path that someone has worked to clear out.  I brought two large garbage sacks with me but after 30 minutes decided I wasn't going to finish and stopped after I filled up the one bag.  There was the usual stuff plus sunglasses, fishing lures, a baseball, and an old radio.

The garbage is thick down here.  

The thing that I find interesting about this spot is that tourists come here from downtown to look at the river. I see them look at the river and then look down to the garbage.  They look horrified and probably a bit surprised.  Maybe expecting better from Minnesota.  We can spend $$$ on the new Viking's stadium just a few blocks away but can't seem to clean up our own riverfront.

Back up through the clearing.  Enough for one walk.

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/