Volunteers needed to hit the trails at Burgess Falls State Park for Trail Clean Up Day Sunday morning.
Park Ranger and Volunteer Coordinator Connor Breeden said the park has a high visitation rate, which means there is a lot of trash left behind. Breeden said the increased amount of visitors over Labor Day Weekend have made it tougher to keep the park clean. Breeden said removing trash helps the environment.
“We take pride in where we work and in the place that we’re trying to protect,” Breeden said. “And it is a larger park and we can’t be everywhere at once, so having people come out to these trail cleanup days really helps us out and helps keep the home of the animals and wildlife clean as well.”
Breeden said volunteers get free reign of the park with a bucket and trash grabbers. Volunteers can work at their own pace and as hard as they want, for as long as they want. Breeden said the event will be Sunday morning from 9 am to noon.
The link to sign up is on the Burgess Falls website on the events page.
Breeden said the park has been having trail clean up days since last May, but the turnout has been small. He said there are usually only a couple of volunteers, but they have had as many as eight. As for the volume of trash, Breeden said that can vary too.
“The most we have picked up was about five five-gallon buckets, so like 25 gallons of trash,” Breeden said. “and it depends. Sometimes, there’s not a lot of garbage, sometimes there is. It just depends on chance I suppose. But after this Labor Day weekend, we have a lot of trash in just different areas of the park.”
Breeden said people are not the only ones leaving litter in the park. He said trash is also brought upstream from the Cumberland Plateau through the Falling Water River.
Breeden said the park has tried to do their part in reducing litter, but there is still quite a bit of garbage.
“We’ve tried multiple things of adding more garbage cans and moving them to different spots, but people just still tend to throw it on the ground or wherever,” Breeden said. “Wherever they want to. So it dosen’t cover up everything, but it’s still not a good thing to look at.”
Breeden said people can do their part in keeping Burgess Falls clean by properly disposing of garbage. He said there are trash cans at various intersections in the park and in the parking lot.
For those who can not attend the September 7 cleanup, another cleanup day is scheduled for September 20 for National Public Land day. Breeden said one of the goals that day will be to remove an old fridge from the back end of the Burgess Falls Lake.
