A dozen or more members of the Chilkat Snowburners snowmachine club gathered heaps of trash from the woods and flats near 25 Mile Haines Highway Sunday.
Group member Chris Brooks hauled car batteries, old tires and plastic debris from a dump site in an alder thicket, while Randy and Pam Sloper gathered broken bottles and other destroyed items from an area near an embankment used as a rifle range.
Brooks said the group also cleaned up the area last fall. Besides refrigerators, dishwashers and “quite a bit of household trash,” Brooks said he previously found 10 trash bags full of clothes there.
“It comes down to it shouldn’t be here and it doesn’t have to be here,” Brooks said.
Pam Sloper said she was concerned about use of the area as a rifle range, considering the cost of a recent clean-up of lead shot and bullets at another unauthorized range near 7 Mile. “You know there’s got to be a pile of it out here.”
Because of busy summer schedules, this week’s cleanup was be a light one, Brooks said. He said he hoped to get metal trash stockpiled there, awaiting arrival of the next scrap metal barge.
The pile of trash Brooks hauled included three car batteries, a bag of household trash, and an aluminum baseball bat. The remains of a big-screen television were piled up a few hundred feet away.
A pair of volunteers discovered another pile about a mile downriver containing construction debris, burnt-up aerosol cans, and an old car radio.
The 25 Mile area was the focus of a similar cleanup about five years ago that included burnt-up furniture and several junked cars. The area lies within the boundaries of the Alaska Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve and is a popular destination for snowmachiners, cross-country skiers and fishermen.