On April 13th I set back out to Hickory Top Wildlife Management Area to do more of a preliminary scouting trip to help formulate a plan to start cleaning up the Managment Area. I had the goal of removing just one bag of trash on this walk and would be walking about two miles. As it stands now, I still don't have any real plan to tackle the whole thing and after this and the next clean-up I realized just how big of an area it is and how much trash is out there.
I started at the boat launch and walked the access road that runs along the designated duck portion of the WMA. Walking the access road would give me an idea of what areas I can make it to on foot. Some portions of the WMA are just too thick or thorny to walk through, but others are open easy to walk.
This was the view for much of the walk and I was just scanning the left hand side to see where I could get in.
Around a mile down the access road I found an open area and went in to check it out. It was similar to the first clean-up at the other end, but here the trash was much more spread out and away from the lakeside. From this point I didn't think it would be that bad of a walk out with one bag so I started picking up.
Found this right at the start and I decided not to take it. Glass doesn't really break down and do much harm and because of the age I thought it best to leave it. I have never heard of King Size Beverages and I am sure it is older than 40 years. Some would consider this a historic item and although I did explain to the DNR everything that I would be removing, I don't think antique bottles crossed anyones mind. Things like this could fall under artifact laws, so if you do a clean-up too consider leaving old glass items. Because it isn't really harmful and doesn't break down like plastic, I kind of like the idea of someone else finding it in another 50-60 years.
There were not too many clusters of trash in this area. Everything was just spread out. Mostly plastic bottles.
I found several of these old round bottom bottles that had found a second life as buoys either for catfish lines, traps or markers. Over time the lines on them just snapped and they found there way back here. Who knows this bottle could have helped someone 30 years ago pull some monster catfish out of the lake.
Tires without rims aren't that hard to carry out. I am sure I will be able to remove this in the future, but I am not looking forward to removing the rim out of it. Tires do leach chemicals they are composed of, so I do want to try to remove all I can from along the lake. I have seen tires used for fish habitats in South Carolina. Although well meaning and it does get tire waste out of site, it put things in our water that shouldn't be there.
At one spot there were multiple racket/tennis balls. I may have mentioned in the previous post. If you do enough clean-ups you end up seeing clusters like this. Where similar items of the same dimensions/densities/materials will end up accumulating in an area together.
The punctures on either side of this flop and the back portion missing lets me know that it was out on the water floating for a long time. The punctures are made by larger predatory fish, possibly gar. They may think it is a rodent or something swimming or floating in the water and they attack. I have found many flip flops like this.
The bag starting to fill up.
After I felt the bag was full enough I started to head out. By this point it was beginning to get hot and where I went in ended up being further from the exit than I had thought it was.
A little under a mile to go.
Nearly to the parking lot.
At home I sorted things out a bit wrote down the count of plastic bottles, bagged it all back up and placed it with the two bags from the previous trip. I had a plan to go back the next day and in that post is where this clean-up starts to get fun for me.
I am pretty behind right now in getting these blog posts out. I missed getting one out last week and I need to put a few more out in the next couple days to get caught up. I am going to try to get a new one up tomorrow, that is being hopeful. If you read this far, I hope you enjoyed this post.
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