Brenna Latchford


On this particular day we had people from the community come and help us clean up the forest because it was public lands day. Public lands day is when anyone can dome and clean up their community. We first all met up at the ranger station to meet the people we would be working with. Then we set out for the mountains. It was over cast that day and we were climbing through the fog bank and reached the top of the mountain. It was just cold enough for a thin layer of frost to be on the ground. We had been told we were going to clean up the “shotgun rounds” and any other garbage. The shotgun rounds were easy to find, there were so many of them. The site that we were at was used as target practice. There was an old truck bed that had hundreds of holes in it. We headed down the mountain and split into two group. One group started at the top and the other group started at the bottom, we were sweeping and meeting in the middle.  We had found something down off the road and one of our group members went to go get it and ended up finding a tire. Some of us went down to help bring the tire up and we ended up finding four more tires. We then started walking up the trail and found the other group. Neither group found very much garbage. We then all headed down for a quick lunch break. While eating lunch at a campsite we ended up restoring some of the campsites. Once we finished we head up the side of the mountain again, but this time in a different place. We ended up finding lots of garbage; cans, glass bottles, rice bag, plastic bags and a spine of a deer. After finding all the garbage we loaded up all the bags and took it back to the ranger station.  We said good bye to the community helpers and made our way back to Port Townsend.