Last week we had probably one of the least appealing land steward workdays I can think of at Moose Mountains Reservation: a dump clean-up. This wasn't just a collection of materials left by people not wanting to pay a dump fee to dispose of their waste now and then; this was years (decades even) of household trash dumped in a single location. Since that location is very visible - right next to the Moose Mountains parking area and kiosk - we scheduled this workday to get as much of it cleaned up as possible.
"before" shots of the MMR dump
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| Land Steward Bob Lyon and DRED employee Bob Spoerl haul trash to the dumpster |
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| Jason finds an old knife |
The metal pile (L) and the site when we were finished (R)
Thankfully the trash had been there long enough that most of the organic material was gone, leaving mostly glass bottles and metal, but when we started digging and bottles started breaking it definitely got stinky pretty quickly. From some of the items we found (old license plates, soda cans, etc) we were able to date the dump to the late 40s and early 50s. The coolest finds were probably old bottles and farm equipment (including a horseshoe); the creepiest were old doll parts, and the grossest a full jar of cold cream from the 1950s (wrinkle treatment, anyone?). When we had cleaned up several layers of trash, we covered over the site with branches and leaves to conceal it, and called it a day. Only about a quarter of the 30yd dumpster was filled, but we also hauled out a half dumpster full of metal (taken by scrappers within minutes of Wendy listing it on Craigslist) and about 25 tires. We are truly grateful for the 8 volunteers who came out to help on this workday- it was not a pretty one!
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| creepiest find |
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| The dump crew (minus Wendy, taking the photo) |
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