This weekend, the staff at CSERC and close to 20 volunteers gathered at the Red Hills on Saturday morning. The mission: to work with Mark Pertersen of the BLM on cleaning up several locations that have been used as a shooting range over the years. As many residents of this area know, this is an ecologically sensitive area due to the Serpentine soil that defines the Red Hills. The unique qualitites of this soil allows limited, often rare types of vegetation to successfully take root. The creeks that run through this area even have a fish known as the Red Hills Roach that is endemic to this spot alone! Needless to say, the continued use of this special location as a shooting range has been compromising the delicate diversity of the Red Hills. By picking up the accumulated waste and posting new signs, CSERC and the BLM wants the Red Hills not to be identified as a place that is acceptable for use as a shooting range. Washing machines, scrap metal, refrigerators, thousands of bullet shells, and more were gathered by our trusty workers, loaded into their pickup trucks, and taken to Waste Management for proper disposal. The weather was great and spirits were high, and by the time the volunteer crew was done the locations targeted looked much more like the natural environment that should be there. Check out these pictures to get an idea of what we accomplished!
What a mess!
Getting started.
A sampling of the trash that our volunteer’s collected.
Hard at work!
Gathering the thousand of bullet shells was tedious but unavoidable. Thank goodness for folks like Frank who are willing to do what has to be done!
A small portion of the bags of shells we gathered.
Our trucks were loaded down!
A job well done!
Happy volunteers. Thanks for your help!
-the staff at CSERC
Do you have any suggestions for potential environmental volunteer projects that CSERC could organize? Post them here!
sabiniana Says:
April 28th, 2008 at 11:47 pmVisit sabiniana
Great job, folks! Keep up the good work. So glad to know you are there.
John Buckley Says:
May 9th, 2008 at 3:20 amVisit John Buckley
Nice work Julia… Now the goal is to convert Blog visitors to supporters, and supporters to donors, and donors to major givers and enthusiastic doers, and then to have the givers and doers become the finders of more like-minded thinkers who will swell our support until we are amazed by our expansion and growth.
Perhaps one day we will look back and find that this Blog led to countless new folks learning about our efforts and sharing our mission to defend our world-renowned region.