A little rant today: over the Fourth of July Holiday, I went hiking on the Fleming Trail System in the Eldorado National Forest. I’ll post a summary about it later. While on that hike, I ventured into another area down the Blue Gouge Mine Road, which is the Yin to the Flemming Trail System’s Yang, and I was appalled by the trash on public lands I encountered.
Some of the road is on private land and then moves onto public land, and I was appalled by what I saw on both public and private land. What happens on private land is up to the landowner as long as it’s legal, so I don’t have much to comment about there, but what I saw on public land infuriated me.
I have no problem with anybody who uses firearms responsibly, and that they are permitted in national forest areas, including Eldorado. However, what I saw on the ground in the Blue Gouge Mine area were a countless amount of shotgun gun shells, (more than 1,000 easy), shell casings for pistol ammunition laying on the ground, as well as shell casings for hunting rifles. There was also regular trash all over the place – beverage cans (alcohol and non-alcohol), discarded paper plates and other miscellaneous trash.
Further along the road past the mining area, I observed discarded clothing in two separate spots and other beverage cans that were tossed aside. In these areas, my first thought was hunters, but then I quickly discarded that notion, as the majority of hunters respect the environment in which they hunt.
I cannot understand why people can’t pick up after themselves. They come into these beautiful areas and leave them looking worse than the county dump. The artifacts in the mine area, though not an old mine, were destroyed, and trash and ammunition shells surrounded them. The job of cleaning up this place is too enormous for one person – it would take a small team at this point.
Update 10/12/2019: In late September, the Forest Service conducted a clean up of the Blue Gouge Mine Road near the Fleming Trail System, and you can read about it on the Eldorado National Forest Facebook Page.
