What just happened?  We held, on fairly short notice, our first ever Fall In-River Clean Up last Saturday morning.  If you happened to be crossing the bridge and looked over the side, you might have been surprised to see people wading around in the presence of, but rarely in canoes.  Instead of holding people, the canoes bore a motley assortment of tires and other trash.

All told, we collected 23 tires, one mattress pad, one inflatable bed, one hot water heater, and several bags of simple trash.

The goal was t ires and we were wildly successful in extracting them.  While it proved easier than expected -- we had heard tales and had visions of crow bars and divers and having to pry them from the muck -- it was still WAY harder than it would have been to dispose of the tires properly in the first place!  It took us 17 volunteers over the course of 41 man hours plus the assistance of  Bucknell Outdoor Education (canoe loan), the William Cameron Engine Company (tire hose down to remove silt), Buck's Auto (cargo van donation), Expert Tire in Sunbury (tire collection program for clean ups), and Ron Kessler (scrap metal collection).  Our volunteers were evenly split between Bucknell students, all from the Environmental Residential College (way to go first years!), and community members.  All told it works out to an equivalent of about $950, allowing for the volunteer labor rate.  Even without accounting for the volunteers' time, it was $250 of direct, but donated costs.  So that's between $11 and $40 per tire.

Surely it would have been simpler to just dispose of the tires properly in the first place.  Yes, it costs a few dollars per tire (typically $3 to $5 each at a tire store or Lycoming Landfill), but then we could have all those volunteer hours devoted to something more constructive, like improving river access or keeping view corridors between parks and river clear.

All that said, it was really kind of fun.  And, especially on the day in the water -- muddy but not hopelessly so.  Without a doubt, it was messier moving the tires once they were on land, without the instant rinse of the river water flowing past.  We learned some lessons for next time and we'll look for a time to do it again.

In the meantime, stay tuned for your opportunity to get muddy in Bull Run later in September.  We don't expect any tires there, but there is sure to be a variety of sports equipment and we've heard of a length of construction fencing too.