Who is killing the Rubicon Trail

Subject:
Who is Killing the Rubicon.
Date:
Mon, 30 Sep 2002

Just letting you know, I did my part in hoping to keep the trail open, past weekend. I met some folks at Loon Lake for camping, and decided to take the scenic shortcut from Westshore Tahoe in my 93 TLC wagon. I spent some time doing trash pick up and cleaning up since I had plenty of time, and the scenery was so beautiful, you have to stop and look anyway. It seems the most common items are beercans and smaller size water bottles. That was more than 90% of the garbage. The other 10 percent was signs, and caution tape for signaling friends where the camps are. This led me to beleive, the litter is a result of stuff falling out of rigs as they rock and roll their way through the trail. Although there is nothing we can do to stop the yoyos from losing stuff out the back, or out of bags, we can take the initiative to stop and throw it in the back of our rigs. I carry usually two 5 gallon buckets for trash, because after many years of wheeling areas like the Sierras and Trinity forest region, you learn not to want to have that stuff coming loose from a weak little bag. So there really are two things to do to keep from giving too much ammunition to the Sierra Club crowd.
1. Carry a more durable and well locking trash recepticle. ( most rigs are fully
capable of carrying a regular sizegarbage can with a bungeed down lid !)
2. Take the initiative to pick up after the less attentive souls. It's not fair,
but if the trail gets closed down, that is a lot less fair.

To finally answer "Who is killing the Rubicon ?" - Those who drive by other people's BudLight cans, and broken glass on the way, and just cuss at the culprits. I do less demanding but much less popular trails in Shasta Trinity area, and even there, you will see the random cans, bottles etc. We stop pick it up and throw it away. We will not be able to stop the general public from committing random acts of littering. But we can take a moment and put those itemns into our rigs and know that we actually did something to keep th trail clean.
As a side note to the topic, I think the real environmental issue to me seemed was the presence of leaky rigs on the trail. I followed some marks on flat rocks several 100 feet in length that was a leaky pumpkin or oil pan mostly near the Loon lake section of the trail. That's bad ! It is a lot easier to pick up cans than to pick gear lube trails off a rock face that used to rival Yosemite rock formations in looks. If someone is taking a leaky rig on the trail, they should be shut down, and made to clean up all of it, drain the part that's leaking and tow that sucker out of there. I am sorry, but oil leaks and gear oil coming out of pumpkins and T-cases should not be tolerated by anyone. How long before the whole trail is one long oil spill? Wrap and tape a towel, or sweatshirt, around those areas that leak, if you hit something, and take the rig home, fix it, then come back and finish.

Thanks,

Miklos Kovacs