Snowrider Clean Up Success!

No one said it was going to be easy, and it wasn't.  Not by a long shot.  Today I volunteered with the Seattle Chapter of the Surfriders for their all-mountain clean up event at The Summit.  This past season I basically "discovered" Alpental for myself, and then spent 5 months there from December until April tearing it up.

I never actually dropped any trash or equipment, but after having a season pass for 6 years, I thought I'd better help clean up the mountain for some karma points.

I decided to immediately head up the mountain and pick up trash along the path of Armstrong Express chair...seen in the picture to the right.  This was much more daunting than I imagined it was going to be.  First of all there's no real "path" to follow under the chair at all, so you have to sort of meander along the cable lines looking for spots to hike and stay relatively centered under the chair in order pick up any cans, bottles, lift tickets, broken equipment etc. that is typically the left over debris from a ski season under the lifts.

The underbrush is very thick and rugged, and was very difficult to navigate.  There are a lot of places where you can lose your footing and slip into deeper underbrush, and it really was a lot more effort than I anticipated.

Here's a picture looking down the slope next to Armstrong Express chair where I started to have to veer off a bit from the chair path due to a very fast running stream and series of short waterfalls along the path.

If you ski Alpental, you know this area well, as you pass over it on the chair and look down to see hints of rushing water under deep snow.

I continued up as far as I could considering that I had two trash bags with me.  What I didn't anticipate was that the thick underbrush would of course start to tear apart my bag, so I double-bagged it to prevent it from completely being unusable.

My original goal was to clean up trash all the way to the top of Armstrong Express, then double back down and head down towards Sessel.  This whole plan changed as my trash bag started filling up more and more to the point where it was nearly unmanageable.

The problem I ran into with my goal of reaching the top of the chairlift was simple...my garbage bag became almost too heavy to carry back down the mountain.  I had not anticipated finding so much trash that I might not even be able to carry it off the mountain.  I guess I figured that I would only find a few beer cans and that would be it.

Lesson learned!  When we are all skiing up there it's so easy to enjoy the beautiful snow without realizing that there really is a lot of trash that gets hidden away over the winter and doesn't emerge until later.

Here's the path I hiked today picking up as much trash as I could at Alpental:

Screenshot Credit:  Google Earth

Here's the elevation profile from this route:

Screenshot Credit:  Geocontext-Profiler

All I can say is that all of the volunteers today were awesome!  Everyone picked up a lot of residual trash from a great ski season.  Whenever you are skiing or snowboarding up there, please be aware that any trash you toss off a chair, or along the slopes has to eventually be picked up by hand by an amazing group of volunteers that literally take it to the extreme to help keep the slopes beautiful for everyone.