One Step Closer to a Better, Cleaner Watershed

South Platte River Clean-Up

Sunday the boating community around Denver celebrated Earth Day by getting out on the South Platte and cleaning up the trash. For those of you who are not familiar with the South Platte let me give you a little background. This river flows all the way through Denver starting in the commercial and manufacturing parks of Denver first. By the time it reaches Confluence Play Park, 9 miles down the river, the water is pretty nasty. They don’t call it Hepatitis Hole for nothing! I have been playing at Confluence for the past few weeks because nothing else anywhere close to the Front Range is running, after seeing some of the stuff we cleaned up I am kind of second guessing my after school play options.
The South Platte Clean-up is a fairly new idea. Last year, the first year, about 100 people collected two tons of trash in 9 miles. This year more people came out to help. I believe our numbers were closer to 150 or 200. It was great to see family’s as well as the college communities around Denver come out and clean up the environment, especially one so important to all of us.

Check it out.

We all started at once, here is some of the boats. I bet there were about 70 or 80 water crafts out on the river.

Hanging with my friends Marilee and Maria in the Ducky and a cool family on the raft. the rafters were pretty neat. They would pull into and eddy and everyone would

pile out and clean up the side of the river and then jump back into the raft.

If you look closely you can see a trash bag in my cockpit. We would fill our trash bags up and give them to the rafts. We also set safety at the bottom of the drops just to make sure everyone was good to go.

I am Glad I got to take part in this event

Hopefully after school is out, I can travel further on the weekends and get my paddle on.
SYOTR,
Christine