Over 65 volunteers joined partners, the Landers Community Association, the BLM Barstow Field Office and the Mojave Desert Land Trust who secured a roll-off container from Burrtec waste to remove over 5.62 tons of illegally dumped waste from 5 locations around Giant Rock on Saturday, September 9th, 2017.
Community members provided their own trucks, trailers and tools to bring overflow to Landers Landfill using their own dump cards.
The BLM disposed of the 25 tires collected and cordoned off the newly discovered hazardous waste sites for safe collection by their hazmat team.
The day began with a safety briefing from the BLM BFO, who provided gloves, tools, buckets, bags and cold water. Volunteers chose a work site and began collecting waste, hauling load after load to the dumpster.
Peter and Patrick from MDLT headed to Site #1, providing a trailer, bags and additional gloves to volunteers who worked northward meeting other teams to clear an entire stretch of debris from a side road. Check out the before and after videos below.
SITE #1 BEFORE
Site #1 AFTER
While the event was scheduled to conclude at 11AM, one barely recognizable shotgun riddled refrigerator full of broken TV screen glass and other debris remained at a newly identified site. Mike Lipsitz volunteered his dump card, Mike Hawkins his truck, and together with Ocean, River, Robert and Sarkis, we worked until 12:30 to gather this last load of trigger trash.
While we worked we exchanged stories about amazing past activities at Giant Rock and subterranean resident Frank Critzer as part of #storiesandstewardship.
The project grew rapidly over the course of one month, from an abandoned cove campsite with hazardous human waste, initially identified by Explorers of the Mojave Desert member Matt Doan, expanding to five locations identified around Giant Rock. View the interactive map by Positional Projects here.
Watch the MDLT’s video below.