Volunteers remove 500 pounds of trash from Helena recreation areas

About 500 pounds of trash came out of seven Helena recreation sites after more than 70 volunteers and students spent the morning cleaning places many families, hikers and anglers use every spring. The haul from Saturday’s Earth Day cleanup shows how much litter can build up at the Causeway, North Hills, Scratchgravel Hills, York Bridge, Regulating Reservoir and Upper Prickly Pear Creek just as the season shifts toward heavier use.

Wild Montana’s Wild Divide Chapter organized the cleanup from 9 a.m. to noon on April 11, with volunteers meeting at the Home2 Suites gravel lot before heading out across the city’s trailheads and access points. The event required pre-registration and brought in students from Carroll College, Helena High School, Capital High School and East Helena High School, giving the effort a wide footprint across Lewis and Clark County’s schools and neighborhoods.

The group said the work is about more than making public lands look better. Keeping garbage out of the area helps protect the ecosystem and the animals that live there, and it reduces the kind of debris that can make trailheads and fishing access sites less safe for the people who use them every day. Volunteers even found an unusual item, a machete at one trailhead, underscoring how public lands can collect everything from bottles and food wrappers to potentially dangerous trash.

Wild Montana said its Wild Divide Chapter hosts the cleanup each year as part of its Earth Day and Earth Month outreach. The chapter serves Lewis and Clark, Broadwater, Jefferson and Powell counties and focuses on public lands around Helena, including the Big Belts, the Elkhorns and the Continental Divide. The Helena effort was one of several stewardship events the group scheduled statewide in April, and it came as another local cleanup along York Road last month pointed to a continuing litter problem in the Helena area.

For residents who use these sites to walk, fish, ride or take children outside, the cleanup was a reminder that the condition of Helena’s open spaces depends on more than spring weather and county maintenance. It also depends on whether the people who rely on those places are willing to keep showing up to protect them.