don't trash the canyon please!

So I got off of a long shift yesterday at work and decided to go to Del Puerto Canyon to admire the natural beauty that borders the western edge of our city there. Along the drive I noticed a female deer (doe) grazing in the tall grass between the canyon road and I-5 where the city's General Plan Advisory Committee suggested expanding the city's borders for the purpose of general commercial and estate residential housing. But I continued on, stopping to admire the site for just a moment. The sunset colors were soon about to peak and I had not yet decided what vantage point to assume, however, when rounding a corner an infamous pile of canyon trash caught my eye, neatly placed along side the road at the Eagle Rock (Graffiti Rock) turnout.

My first thoughts, of course, were to search through the bags to hopefully find a couple articles of junk mail with an address so that I could politely return the trash to its rightfull owner. Who knows, maybe they accidentally forgot their trash there and were hoping someone would return it to them... but I doubt it.

My rules for returning canyon trash to its rightful owner require me to find at least two articles of thrown away trash with the same address, that proves to me that it was much less of an accident if I found just one address.

This type of thing happens to me pretty often, unfortunately, when I go to the canyon. Last time, in the exact same turnout, I found boxes and bags of random household trash with three articles of thrown away mail with the same address... bingo! So I loaded it all in my car and returned it to its rightful owner at a house with a Tracy address in an upscale housing tract neigborhood complete with its own manmade lake. I can only imagine the look on their faces when opening the front door and finding all of their trash back on their porch after thinking they left it 30 miles away. I just hope that they learn not to do it again... especially not in Del Puerto Canyon! That's the worst place to leave your trash because hardly no one, including landowners, go out there to pick it up.

I'm just glad that I didn't find anything toxic in those bags of trash, for I've had to step in front of target shooters to grab one of their targets that happened to be a CAR BATTERY! sitting on a rock right inside the creek bed!!!! First these guys were shooting oak trees, and after I explained to them that they are slowly killing the tree they started shooting the car battery in the creek bed... @#$%@#$^%

After searching and retrieving the bags of trash, some that had rolled down the hill, only one address showed up. It was at the back of a training packet for KFC workers from store #261, the owners of which live in Merced. I thought it was kind of funny that one of the sections in the training packet was "PRACTICE CONTROLLING WASTE".

After further analysis of the trash, it was obvious that the bags were left there after someone collected all the trash in the Graffiti Rock area. Much of it was target practice, boxes shot full of holes, empty boxes of ammo, fast food trash from Jack In the Box, Wendys, Carl's Jr, In N' Out, discarded picnic supplies, beer bottles, etc. So to whoever it was that took the time to collect the trash...THANK YOU! I could fit all but two bags into the back seat and trunk of my car and will go back for the rest later if someone hasn't decided to use it as target practice. Now if we can only get the high school to go pick up their old gym lockers that wound up out there after the 1998 remodel.