Durango Woman Spends Three Decades Picking Up Trash as Personal Mission

Most people walking the trail along Rim Drive beside Fort Lewis College notice the panoramic views of Durango and the La Plata Mountains. Janet Reichl notices the trash.

For close to 30 years, Reichl, now 76, has been venturing out several days a week armed with a trash-grabber and a plastic bag, steadily working to reduce the city's litter footprint one stretch of pavement and trail at a time. What began as a personal mission has drawn in a pair of young recruits: brothers Bennett DeRaad, 6, and Carson DeRaad, 4, elementary school-age neighbors who have folded the garbage hunts into their homeschooling routine.

Reichl relocated to Durango from Wisconsin, which she remembers as being relatively clean, and the contrast with her new city's litter problem set her on a course she hasn't abandoned since. She has formally "adopted" a 1½-mile stretch of East Animas Road, County Road 250, near the north city limits, making it among the most consistently tended roadsides in the area.

The work comes with surprises. Among the stranger items pulled from the brush near the Lion's Den and along Rim Drive over the years: an old trunk, a metal helmet, a Darth Vader mask, and what amounts to a running history of Coors cans. She has also turned up cash, including several $20 bills near Star Liquors and a $100 bill near the former recycling drop-off site at the base of Chapman Hill. She keeps the money, using it to fund supplies including plastic bags and replacement picker sticks.

"It's just fascinating what you find," Reichl said.

She also has a habit of collecting unmatched gloves, which she admits serves little practical purpose. "I don't know why I save them," she said. "Every once in a while I find something I can match up and use." When an item looks lost rather than discarded, she runs a classified ad to try to locate the owner.

Three decades in, the stretches of Rim Drive and northeast Durango that Reichl tends remain among the tidiest corridors in the city, and the DeRaad brothers are learning the route.