Volunteers will join U.S. Forest Service employees Saturday, October 10, to pick up trash in the Hiawatha National Forest.

The group plans to meet at 9 a.m., rain or shine, at the Castle Rock parking lot at the intersection of I-75 and Business Loop I- 75. Everyone is welcome.

Since the clean-up days began 18 years ago, there have been 33 such meetings of volunteers, during which more than 51 illegal dump sites have been eliminated and more than 114 tons of trash have been removed from the St. Ignace district of the Hiawatha National Forest.

When the program was started in the early 1990s, the district was in sad shape with several large dumping sites overrun with garbage, event organizer Tom Briggs said.

"Before that, there was no light at the end of the tunnel for a number of years," Mr. Briggs said. "Now we have the main ones cleaned up. It has come a long way from what it was when it started."

Back then, groups of volunteers and U.S. Forest Service workers needed help from bulldozers at some of the original dump sites, he said, with sites like an old road off Cheeseman Road littered with piled trash stretching one-quarter mile long. Now, the problem is not nearly that extreme, although the twice yearly maintenance by the volunteers is absolutely necessary to clear out some of the established and newly created illegal dumping sites in the forest.

Without these clean-up days, these dump sites would build over the years again , said Lynn Hyslop from the U.S. Forest Service office in St. Ignace.

"I think there is a tie there to the economy," Mrs. Hyslop said. "When the economy is down, people have a tendency to reduce what they pay for, and garbage is one of those things."

Both Mrs. Hyslop and Mr. Briggs said bulk trash pick-up days offered by townships and cities in the region have helped alleviate the dumping of some bigger items like appliances.

Educating the public about the beauty of the forest and the necessity to keep it free of waste is important to its future, Mr. Briggs said.

"It is all about educating the younger people that you've got something that's really nice here in the woods, and you can't take it for granted," he said. "More young people growing up are starting to realize that."

The night-and-day change from 18 years ago to today is largely a result of the efforts of the small group of people who volunteer to clean up the St. Ignace district of the forest, Mr. Briggs said.

"It shows that you really can make a difference," he said. "It's very important to keep it up."

Mrs. Hyslop agreed, although she said there would likely always be garbage dumping in the forest.

"If we weren't cleaning these areas up," she said, "those sites would be nasty. We would be back to needing a bulldozer to clean them up."

In recent years, Forest Service employees and volunteers have noticed an increase in waste from remodeling and construction projects, something Mrs. Hyslop attributes to the decline in the economy.

In addition to these larger items being dumped at certain sites in the forest, Mr. Briggs said there is also a problem with drivers throwing trash out of their windows, which sits along the roadside until either Forest Service employees or local volunteers pick it up.

Once the larger dump sites are under control, Mr. Briggs said he would like to shift the focus of the clean-up days to removing some of this roadside garbage, although the project has not yet evolved to that point.

Anyone with questions about the clean-up day may contact Mrs. Hyslop from the U.S. Forest Service at 643-7900 or Mr. Briggs at 643-6185.