MURRIETA -- Five men and a 7-ton dump truck spread out atop a vista in the Santa Rosa Plateau Ecological Reserve on Saturday morning.
It is a beautiful lookout spot, where the mountains of the Cleveland National Forest are the only thing obstructing the view of Camp Pendleton -- and on a clear day, the ocean. A breeze pushes through the air and the sun continues to heat up as it climbs higher into the sky.
"You can see why people come out to enjoy the view," said Randy Dyer, 18, of Murrieta. "It's so nice when you look up, but when you look down it's depressing."
Dyer was one of the 100 participants who came out for the 13th annual Santa Margarita watershed cleanup. The 26.2 square miles of the watershed provides habitat for plants and animals in Riverside and San Diego counties. Since 1995, volunteers have collected more than 1,300 tons of trash during the annual cleanups.
Dyer was one of two Murrieta Valley High School students who worked side-by-side with a former Environmental Protection Agency enforcement officer, a Murrieta hiker and a county flood control worker to load a dump truck with as much trash as they could in their assigned area. Some of the items they pulled from the chaparral included two refrigerators, a chair, rusted mattress springs, an old television and bags full of litter.
After filling the dump truck, there are discussions of returning to the mountaintop lookout with a rake to get the remainder of decomposing fast-food wrappers, broken glass and other small pieces of garbage that can't be picked up by hand. But of all the things that were pulled from the brush, there was one item of trash that disturbed Steven Fuller, of Sun City, the most.
"Cigarette filter tips. They don't decompose and just look at how many of them there are," said Fuller, a retired water quality enforcement officer with the EPA. "Instead of throwing them on the ground, it would be so easy if people stuck them in their pockets and packed them out."
Carole Bell, who manages the reserve, said the number of participants in the yearly clean up has gone down since nearby cities initiated similar efforts. But that doesn't deter her efforts.
"As long as there is trash on the ground, we'll be there to pick it up," she said.
It seems like such an effort for illegal dumpers to make the drive up the winding roads and steep hills into the reserve to throw out their unwanted belongings. But either out of ignorance or the effort to save money, the dumping continues to take place.
Todd Lyons of Murrieta said he enjoyed the physical challenge of picking up as much trash as he could from the rugged terrain.
"This is good work, I like climbing up and down," he said while taking a break. "I usually hike here, but it feels good to help clean up the area. Today has been fun; I'm seeing parts of the reserve I never knew existed."
Contact staff writer Nicole Sack at (951) 676-4315, Ext. 2616, or nsack@californian.com.
