Stewart Park Natural Area Trash Cleanup

My youngest son and I just got back from picking litter and trash up in the Stewart Parkway Natural Area. We started at the corner of Garden Valley and Stewart Parkway and worked our way down past the Duck Pond, then back through the Natural area. Few observations: We need to do these cleanups monthly before the mower goes through and chews up the litter and garbage into little shreds. Makes it 5x harder to do the cleanup. There is a large abandoned camp in the trees close to Stewart Parkway. Whoever set it up must have cleaned out the donations from Goodwill one night because there are Christmas decorations and lights all over the place. Also the mattress has been there for about 2 months now. This abandoned camp still needs to be cleaned up. There are at least three active camp sites that we came across during the cleanup, and we didn't make it over to the Duck Pond side where there is likely more. I marked them on a map. I found a nice bike that had been abandoned by the creek. I will make a post to see if we can find the owner. There is a lot of landscaping and tree thinning that needs to be done in there. I'm going to meet with the Parks Department to do a walkthrough of the area and see what type of work the community could help out with. Ultimately we need to open things up via trimming to improve line of sight as much as possible to make it more difficult for people to illegally camp in there as well as make the area more safe for the community to walk through. It really is a beautiful area all through there, we just need to all work together to clean it up and make it more appealing for the community to use. Whoever stopped and thanked us while you were driving by, that was awesome, my son got a kick out of that :) 🤙