Vampire teeth, a vintage boat, and messages in a bottle: America’s cultural indicators?

Intro by Tina Casagrand first published in the Missouri Stream Team blog celebrating 25 years this year.


Did you know that New York City’s municipal landfill has an anthropologist-in-residence? She looks at what the people of the city throw away, the history of sanitation workers, and lots of other fascinating things. That got me thinking . . .  maybe a similar task could be taken for the spot where North America’s largest waterways meet. What could cleanup hauls at the Missouri-Mississippi Confluence tell us about litter habits in the eastern and western parts of our country?

Missouri River Relief (Stream Team #1875) has a head start on this research. They’ve tallied trash from their clean-ups for years. April 26th’s Earth Day at the Confluence continued to surprise volunteers and crew alike with a wealth of trash and treasure.

Here are some details on MRR’s work out of Columbia Bottom Conservation Area on April 26. Mull over these cultural indicators, and if you know of any anthropologists looking for a project, tell them to give MSTWC a call!

Earth Day at the Confluence *Results*

Columbia Bottom Conservation Area

Missouri River Clean-up 4-26-14

Volunteers:  178

MRR Crew:  31

Boats:  10 (2 USACE, 3 MDC, 1 Hanson P.S., 4 MRR)

Rivermiles:  9 ( 8 miles of the Missouri, 1 mile of the Mississippi)

River Level:  10 ft (St. Charles gage) 14.8 ft. (on the Mississippi at St. Louis)

Tires:  30 (an estimated .5 tons)

Landfill:  2.8 tons

Scrap Metal:   1.35 tons

Total Tonnage:  4.7 tons

Agencies & Groups:  Missouri River Relief Crew, Missouri Department of Conservation, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Hanson Professional Services, Cub Scout Pack 97, Cadette Girl Scout Troop #435, Baden Powell Service Association 66^th Confluence Scout Group, Anderson Pest Solutions, BioMerieux, Alpha Phi Omega– Washington University, Ethical Navigators 33, Flying Carps, Bank of America, St. Louis University, Boeing, Arnold Stream Team 211, Stream Team 3454 Anglers of Missouri, Saving the World Before Noon, Miramiguoa Master Naturalist, Weber Group, Kabul Waterdogs – Stream Team 3419, Stream Team 4855, Pack 3097, Stream Team River Rovers #4473,

Team Names:  Flying Carp, X-Stream Team, Pack 97, Navigators, A-Team, Super Flying Ninja Kittens, Asian Carp Avengers, Anderson, River Dogs, Otters, Mo Mud Hens, Timberwolves, The Bass Fisherman, 66^th Confluence Team, Hardcore Team Tough Guy, The Collaborators, River Rebels, Team Smokinbarrel

Event Sponsors

• Missouri American Water
• Great Rivers Greenway
• Missouri Dept. of Conservation
• Missouri Dept. of Natural Resources
• U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service - Columbia Ecological Services Field Office
• Rivermiles
• Walmart
• Bass Pro Shops
• Pat Jones
• Tom and Anne Smith

Event Partners

• Bandana's BBQ
• U.S. Army Corps of Engineers
• Missouri Stream Team (Celebrating its 25th Anniversary!)
• Bridgestone/Firestone - One Team, One Planet
• ACE Scrap Metal
• Columbia Bottom Conservation Area
• Metropolitan Sewer District
• Hanson Professional Services

Plus great tunes by Eddie Buchanan & Co.!

Trash Tally!

201 bags of trash

30 tires

11 chunks o’ Styrofoam

4 coolers

11  5-gal. plastic buckets

1  20-gal. plastic tub
12  55-gal. plastic barrels

2  55-gal. metal drums

4 partial metal drums

1 water heater

1 propane tank

1 AC unit piece

1 600 lb Automotive Transformer

1 boxspring

1 chair

2 barge lines

1 buoy

1 car seat cushion

4 gas tanks
1 rim

2 inner tubes

1 - 1957 fiberglass Saber boat

1 oil pan

1 metal trash can

1 pulley

5 metal poles

10 ft. of 2” angle iron

5 ft. of corrugated metal

1 – 6ft. metal pole

8 pieces of metal cable

2 metal locker doors

1 tiny saw blade

1 tv

1 lateral drain tile

2 orange booms
1 chicken wire

1 Rubbermaid tote

1 Rubbermaid lid

1 wall to a Porta-Potti

2 PVC pipes

1 white picket fence

1 bookshelf
A gazillion million balls

1 softball owned by Gary Babetz

1 kiddie push cart

1 rubber canteen

2 milk crates

1 fishing pole

1 dog kennel top

2 pieces of wood with nails

1 big plastic bowl for Clifford

Trash Contest!!! (winners in bold)

1 yellow piggy bank

1 dead snake dead from plastic netting wrapped around it

1 dead gar

1 studded football massage ball

2 armless baby dolls

1 pair of purple vampire teeth

2 doll heads

16 balls

1 coconut

1 water ski

1 plastic checker

1 plastic rabbit

1 plastic duck on wheels

1 easter egg

3 duck decoys

1 plastic penquin

1 wooden flower & bird

1 pink panther print on foam

1 black flip flop

1 men’s cologne box

1 igloo cooler

1 newspaper mailbox

1 plastic shovel

1 swim pad

1 light bulb

1 kids plastic table

1 plastic cone

1 window squeegee

1 large nail

1 hat

1 bucket

1 fishing lure

1 toy fire truck

1 cassette tape

1 turtle shell

1 construction helmet

Several old glass bottles

1 9mm handgun

1 message in a bottle with several letters inside

 

Cleaning up the Confluence!

4th Annual Confluence Trash Bash 2012

Columbia Bottom Conservation Area, Spanish Lake, MO

March 24, 2012

Rivermile 0-5 – River Stages: St Charles – 23.4 ft; Alton – 14.5; St. Louis – 19.5

Hosted by Confluence Partnership, St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District, St. Louis Audubon, Arnold Stream Team 211, Grace Hill Americorps, Piasa Palisades Sierra Club and a bunch of other businesses, municipalities and organizations

text by Steve Schnarr, photos by John Ruskey and Melanie Cheney, paintings by John Ruskey

We finally got one. After three years of flooding and miserable cold/rainy/snowy weather, this year the Trash Bash landed on a glorious spring weekend. You can’t help but feeling unsettled by the mild winter and early, uniformly beautiful spring. But you also can’t help but get out and enjoy it.

Every year, we keep the option of camping somewhere down at the Confluence for this event, but cold and rain keeps putting us up in cheap hotel rooms. This time, we hooked up with our friends at Big Muddy Adventures (on an adventure that will be described later) and set up camp on the tail end of Duck Island, tucked on the Missouri side of the Mississippi River just downstream of the Confluence. After scouting our sites for the next day’s cleanup, we landed on the island only to be greeted by a beautiful rainbow.

Our Duck Island Camp. photo by John Ruskey

Our part of the Trash Bash is to take a group of volunteers out on the river in boats to clean up the Confluence itself.  Being blessed with perfect weather this time, we were able to go a little further than in Trash Bashes past, actually getting the St. Louis side of the Confluence as well as the mouth of Coldwater Creek, a major urban tributary entering the Missouri at Fort Bellefontaine Park. We were joined this year by two Army Corps of Engineers biologists Megan Kerrick & Ben McGuire and their boat.

Other sites in the Trash Bash include North Riverfront Park, sites along the Maline, Watkins and Coldwater Creeks, some areas on Chouteau Island on the Illinois side, Creve Coeur Lake Park and a massive tire dump on Fee Fee Creek.

Melanie was leading a site along Maline Creek, so she and I headed to the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge where all the NW St. Louis sites were meeting. We gathered our crews together, did a safety talk then headed to our sites.

Melanie's Crew on Site 12 on the Maline. photo by Melanie Cheney

Half our our volunteers were from the Washington University Alpha Phi Omega Service Fraternity. Great kids from a great organization. APO chapters across the state come to help at our clean-ups, always bringing more than 20 folks out to make it happen.

We had a sizable River Relief crew, with even our buddy Mike Smith from Washington, MO, coming to help. Friends from Missouri American Water, Boeing and Biomerieux showed up and we hit the river. All in all, we had 50 volunteers at our site, hitting three four different locations.

Because we had done a really big cleanup last year, this time we focused on spots missed last fall. There was plenty of trash to be hauled out of there, and couldn’t be a more beautiful day to do it.

Volunteers roll countless tires from the floodplain. photo courtesy Arnold Stream Team 211

The best thing about the Trash Bash is that you get to see the impact made in your area, but simultaneously there are groups all over the region making a similar or even greater impact. Our friends with Arnold Stream Team 211 gathered a team of really hard workers to remove tires from the floodplain along Fee Fee Creek. Our board member Francis Baum joined in the effort. These tires are thought to have been scattered from a landfill during a past flood and have been flooded several times since, scattering the tires throughout the riparian forest. This will be a project that takes several massive efforts.

A really great lunch was served up by Confluence Partnership, and then we hit the river again to haul all that trash in. Everything was loaded in boats, which were then trailered and hauled up to the dumpster. We hauled scrap metal and tires back to the Chain of Rocks Bridge to be added to the huge piles there. Including a massive metal tank of some kind dug out of the bank at Columbia Bottom which needed about six people to move.

Trash is unloaded from the trailered boat into a dumpster. photo by Melanie Cheney

After we cleaned up the ramp, we headed out to the Confluence to drift among the swirling junction of the continent’s two longest rivers. The Missouri was cresting, and was pushing huge swirls of muddy water far out into the Mississippi. Massive flocks of cormorants streamed above as we were tossed about in the eddies. We drifted down the Mississippi side of Duck Island, viewing the eagle nest there from afar to not disturb the nesting couple there.

Eventually we ran into John Ruskey and Mark Peoples filling one of their Bell canoes with driftwood. It was their second load and they had moved our campfire down to the sandy point of Duck Island. We parked in a foamy eddy at the point and gathered for a some serious river time with a group of our favorite river lovers. Some lunch leftovers were donated to our camp and were supplemented with healthy snacks. Everyone took turns wandering the island and a driftwood bonfire drew everyone in. Ominous clouds gave way to a beautiful sunset. Cleanup organizers Natalie Johnson and Laura Cohen got ferried over for a moment of relaxation after the firestorm of 750 volunteers.

The sun sets over the Mississippi River and a forest of planted driftwood. photo by Melanie Cheney.

After nightfall, we set up a projector and screen (with a generator tucked far away behind a sandbank) and watched a film about John Ruskey’s adventures last year riding the crest of the Great Flood of 2011 through the state of Mississippi. With a backdrop of the river itself, this film festival had the venue down!

Another short film we watched was about the Circumnavigation of St. Louis. This is the expedition that the Big Muddy Adventures Crew is still doing. Big Muddy Mike Clark, Driftwood Johnny Ruskey and Mark “Rivers” Peoples, “Queen Bee” Betsy Tribble and David Hanson from Seattle were working their way up the Mississippi River in light glass canoes. Their journey had started at the confluence of the Bourbouse and Meremec Rivers, scribing a circle around the greater St. Louis metropolitan area on a highway of rivers.

After pausing at Duck Island for a day, taking a group of Trash Bashers to the island by canoe to remove trash, they would be heading around the Confluence and 70 miles up the Big Muddy. Their virtual passengers were from 7 grades of St. Ann’s of Normandy School, following their adventures online and researching their own topics related to the trip. I’d be joining them Sunday morning, just as David Hanson was getting off and heading back home.

The Circumnavigation Crew heads upstream toward the 367 bridge. photo by John Ruskey

You can read all their expedition journals, check out their amazing photographs, view John Ruskey’s watercolors and see the postings of St. Ann student at the Big Muddy Adventures Schoolhouse Blog.

Around 11 on Sunday, our River Relief crew had packed up and headed to shore. I hopped in a canoe with Mike and Betsy and up we paddled. I stayed on for two days, getting up to St. Charles. It was a powerful and humbling experience, and I hurt for days after. These guys kept going to Washington, MO, 68 miles up the Missouri. From there they would be portaging their canoe overland for 10 miles to hook up with the Bourbouse and finish their trip around St. Louis with a brisk downstream float.

John Ruskey's watercolor of the Circumnavigation (in dark blue). 

John Ruskey watercolor of a side chute on the Missouri River.

River Kids Rock the River

by Melanie Cheney

Well it started with a phone call, the River Kids were doing a week long, river-focused day camp and would love to join up with Missouri River Relief again on the Big River.  We had taken them out last year on the Mississippi, locking through a dam for the first time and worked with them on several clean-ups in years past.  They are a pretty hard-core group of kids, traveling to islands on the mighty Mississippi by canoe with our brother, Big Muddy Mike of Big Muddy Adventures, and have been doing small clean-ups on big rivers for years now.

So if that weren't enough incentive to hit the road with our boats, the River Kids have decided to host their annual party & fundraiser at the City Museum this fall in honor of Missouri River Relief's 10th Anniversary!  So on up we went, to take the kids out on a river trip for their summer day camp.

We met the crew of 20 at the Columbia Bottoms boat ramp.  As is usually the case when we travel to the confluence, the weather was less than ideal.  Winds were blowing in gusts up to 30 miles an hour.  I tied my hat on my head & recommended they do the same.  Once we got out on the river, it didn't seem so bad, we motored up the wide Missouri, then floated back down towards the Confluence of the 2 biggest rivers on this continent, the Missouri & Mississippi.

On the even wider Mississippi, we floated past big islands, enjoying the up-close views of herons & egrets, and best of all, an active eagles nest, all the while, looking for somewhere to eat lunch.  With the rivers running high this Spring, now into the Summer, there wasn't exactly any sandbars to stop at.  So we simply ate lunch in the boats, which the kids didn't seem to mind at all.  They were pretty easy going, and knew a "Big Muddy Adventure" entailed rolling with what the river handed you.   

So on down we went, past the beautiful chain of rocks bridge to our destination, Mosenthein Island.  Here along one of the biggest islands around, there was suppose to be guaranteed at least one sandy spit we could stop at & let them out to play.  Well, there was a sandy spit, but it was about the size of a one-roomed shack.  We stopped anyway, & had a fabulous time letting loose on what we called "Gilligans Island".  There were perfectly round hatched out turtle eggs all over, water soaked sand which made for enticing "quick sand", along with a gigantic red buoy the kids had fun playing on.  We took this group photo from "Gilligans Island" with the St. Louis skyline in the background as the kids literally walked on water.

Ok, it was time to get to work.  Finding a dry place to get in on the island was next to impossible.  It was super muddy with all the high water, so we just got muddy.  There was trash all over the island, we only needed to cover about a 1/4 mile stretch before we had created a large pile of bags to be loaded onto the boats.  The timing was perfect, one hour later, we were headed back for the bus.  We let the kids out at North Riverfront park and formed a "daisy chain" to get the blue bags of trash to the nearest trash receptacle.  Then cleaned up around the highly popular fishing spot before saying our farewells.  The clouds finally cleared up & the wind calmed, what a beautiful day it had turned out!

We took our now empty boats back to the island, and loaded 22 tires the kids had piled up in past clean-ups with Big Muddy Mike before they floated away in what was sure to be more high water soon, & headed back to the Confluence.

It was our brand new plate boats first clean-up, and after asking the River Kids for ideas on names, we christened the boat in the Confluence, and dubbed it the "Robust Ana Deca"  or "RAD" after some great suggestions by the river kids crew.   It literally means "Robust Anniversary Decade".  I don't know if that's what we'll call her for sure, but it sure did  have a nice ring to it on her maiden voyage!

Many thanks to the New City School's River Kids, and their teacher Ben Griffiths for allowing us to be an integral part of such an outstanding crew of young people.

Big Boats, a Cast Iron Tub and Icy Snow

Confluence Trash Bash

Columbia Bottom Conservation Area – 

Cora Island Unit of the Big Muddy Refuge  
March 28, 2011

text by Steve Schnarr, photos by Melanie Cheney
Check out all of our photos from Confluence Trash Bash 2011 by clicking here. 

I’m attempting to catch up on blogs about the great clean-ups we’ve been helping with lately…Bear with me!

The Confluence Trash Bash is a really unique event. People from several different creek watersheds join in to have a massive stream and river clean-up on the same day. The connecting tissue of all of these watersheds is that muddy water that runs out of the Missouri River and hugs the west side of the Mississippi as it flows downstream.

The event is a partnership of countless community groups. The Confluence Partnership, Trailnet and the St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District lead the way, but everybody makes it happen.


photo by Melanie Cheney

While hundreds of community volunteers scoured the streams through their North St. Louis towns, we were one of several big river sites that day. And it should be said (as always, it seems, with the Confluence Trash Bash), the weather wasn’t the best.

Here's the other two big river sites:
Big Muddy Adventures and River Kids hopped in canoes to clean up Mosenthein Island – the massive forested island in the only “non-navigable” stretch of the Mississippi channel.They estimated piling up over 2 tons of tires, barrels and bagged up trash...which they spent the next couple days hauling to shore in canoes.

The Piasa Palisades Sierra Club and the Corps of Engineers tackled two big sites on either side of the Alton bridge on the Alton Pool of the Mississippi.4 tires, a recliner and the parts of a meth lab....so good to get that stuff out of there! Good work guys!

We put folks out in boats from the Columbia Bottom access. Because of the cold, blustery conditions and the threat of snow, many folks that signed up for our Missouri River site just plain didn’t show up. The solution to that was to rob volunteers from other sites that had more than enough.

The site groups were all gathered on straw bale rings near registration. One by one I was able to ask the groups…who wanted to help us on the big river - where it was cold, windy and dangerous. Most people would look at each other and shake their heads. A few in each group smiled. Those folks got maps from me and headed to Columbia Bottom.

In bad weather, there are two clean-up sites near Columbia Bottom that people can always work on. The cool thing is - they are directly across the river from each other just a mile and a half upstream of the boat ramp.

One is a low bank, outside bend spot that always collects tons of trash coming out of Coldwater Creek. Always lots of toys.


photo by Melanie Cheney

The other is an old farm dump on the newly opened Cora Island Unit of the Big Muddy Refuge. We’ve been working on this for several years – along with a contractor with the Army Corps of Engineers. The heavy equipment hauled out the big stuff, volunteers are sweeping up everything else the hard way.


photo by Melanie Cheney

Shovels and pry bars, ropes and teamwork. And it is just amazing to see the difference!  This year’s prize was a cast iron tub. It took six people to haul out through the cottonwood forest.

 photo by Melanie Cheney

The piles that grew on both sides of the river were amazing. And felt so good.

After several hours of scouring the banks for trash, we hauled most folks back to shore. They were headed back to a great lunch and celebration at the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge. Trash Contest…the whole deal.

We headed back out to bring all that trash back before the predicted snow. A whole bunch of folks stuck around for the trash haul, and it went smooth as it could be. As we finished, a hot lunch arrived from the Bridge and we hunkered down in the new Columbia Bottom pavilion and feasted.

Here's a beautiful thing: as we came off the river, all of our friends from the area that just finished up their sites came to help us finish off ours...and clean our tools and pack up. If my face wasn't froze I would've cried.


photo by Melanie Cheney

We trailered our boats full of trash. Landfill junk got offloaded at the dumpster at the ramp. Everything else (tires, scrap metal, a cracked tub) we kept in the boats and dragged to the Old Chain of Rocks Bridge….that amazing, crooked pedestrian bridge across the Mighty Miss. We added our pile of junk to the amazing pile that people had gathered all day in a string of dumpsters full of metal, trash bags and tires.


photo by Melanie Cheney

The ride home was into the teeth of the snowstorm, trying to get our boats and vans back home while we could still park them in our boat yard. It worked, but our boats and vehicles were all coated with a half inch of ice by the time we made it back home.

The snow was gone by the next afternoon.


photo by Melanie Cheney

Cleaning up with the St. Lou Crew - Chapter 1

Duck Island Clean-up with River Kids and Big Muddy Adventures
Columbia Bottom Conservation Area, Spanish Lake, MO
August 20-21, 2009
text by Steve Schnarr, photos by Steve Schnarr

For four years, we’ve been going to help out at Operation Clean Stream, the oldest community river clean-up in the state (this is its 42^nd year). This year we make a little more out of this trip. Several of our St. Louis friends had been asking for us to come work with them, so we decided to pile on several clean-ups at once.

River Kids and Big Muddy Adventures

The coolest river organization I know is the River Kids. It was started at New City School by teacher Ben Griffiths and a group of students that were inspired by Chad Pregracke’s Living Lands and Waters. It has become a student-run/student-organized force for river education and action. These are fourth to sixth graders by the way! They started a non-profit and do restoration and clean-up work, helping out at other organization’s cleanups, adopting their own stretches.

As Ben said, “It’s gotten to the point where you hear third graders saying, ‘I can’t wait until I can be a river kid!’ Plus the older kids are coming in and mentoring the younger ones, showing them how to do this even better.” Ben shakes his head, amazed at where the kids have taken this small idea.

The River Kids have been working with Mike Clark, the force behind Big Muddy Adventures, the only Missouri River paddling outfitter I’m aware of in the St. Louis area. Mike has been taking the River Kids once a month out on the Confluence, showing them how to paddle the big river, then cleaning up Duck Island, a beautiful sandbar-ringed island just downstream of the Confluence on the Mississippi.

This Thursday, with school just about to start, only two River Kids showed up, but they were awesome. Mary is a River Kids veteran, while this was Parker’s first time. Together with Ben, they cleaned up the upstream beach, while Tom Ball and I cleaned downstream. Meanwhile Mike Clark readied a bed of coals for some fresh organic sweet corn and a weenie roast. Our friends Karla Wilson from EcoWorks Unlimited, Christine Favilla from Piasa Palisades Sierra Club, Tom Ball – river worker extraordinaire, all set up camp and gathered firewood.

Soon, music was playing, bellies were full, kids were laughing and the stars came out.

A beautiful night on the river followed by a beautiful sunrise.

Check out the River Kids Blog - http://www.ncsriverkids.org/

& the Big Muddy Adventures website - http://www.2muddy.com/ (BMA just got back from a raft trip down to New Orleans with a German film crew – they’ve got some great stories on their blog about this amazing adventure)

Cleaning up with the St. Lou Crew - Chapter 2

Confluence Clean-up with Whole Foods Market
Columbia Bottom Conservation Area
August 21, 2009

text by Steve Schnarr, photos by Melanie Cheney, Steve Schnarr and Valarie Brunjas

The St. Louis area has two Whole Foods Markets – one in Brentwood and a new one in Town and Country. In July, they invited Missouri River Relief to set up booths at each store for a day to tell customers about the Missouri River and the work we do. In return, they donated 5% of their proceeds for the day to us – it came out to an amazing $7,550!!!

That day, the idea kept bubbling up that we should do a clean-up with the Whole Foods team members. Take a bunch of energetic nature and health conscious folks on the Big Muddy to pick up trash? That’s a no-brainer! So we decided since we were already going to St. Lou for the Operation Clean Stream, we’d do this the day before. Perfect.

We were joined by several area friends. Christine Favilla of the Piasa Palisades Sierra Club has been organizing a clean-up in Alton every year (This year it's part of the Earthtones Festival in Alton on Saturday, Sept 19). She brought her expertise to the house. Karla Wilson has been an organizer and crew member with us for years and helped with set up. Tom Ball, a lifelong river educator and cleaner, was on board from the minute he heard about it. Jeff Barrow, Anthony Pettit, Melanie Cheney and me all came from Columbia.

The Whole Foods crew showed up right on time. Marcia Whelan and Jill Duncan organized the affair, and we had 14 team members show up. Which is an awesome number for a spur of the moment clean-up during the work week! Plus, it was perfect, because we could have one group for each boat – which makes for a better group bonding experience.

We split into to groups: one headed straight to Confluence Point State Park (“The Awesomes”) while the other headed upstream to finish cleaning a rack-pile we’d started in March (“The Copperheads”). Pretty soon the bags started rolling in…

After we dropped off most of the Copperheads, we kept two of them and headed downstream a little ways to clean-up the fishermen accesses. It was a treat, because they were cleaner than ever before. I think people are catching on! Then we snagged a Coast Guard buoy from an eddy where it had washed up.

We returned to the main group just as they were finishing up. We loaded up and headed down to the Confluence, so they could see the joining of the nation’s two biggest rivers – an experience everyone in the area should have. Because the Missouri was so high, its current headed straight out into the Mississippi – quite a sight. Tom Ball gave a talk about the area, and some of the industrial pollution it has suffered in recent memory. Then we headed to Confluence Point to meet up with the others. On our way in, we got a lesson in silver carp – they were jumping around us like popcorn but none got in the boat!

Everyone took a picture at the Confluence, then we boarded boats and headed back to Columbia Bottom ramp.


Lunch was served: yummy Whole Foods sandwiches, fruit and snacks. Everyone got a Missouri Stream Team shirt, and then we were on our way. The best reward, in addition to the over ½ ton of trash we picked up in short order, was a remark by Marcia Whelan. She said she was almost driven to tears several times by the experience. “It was just amazing to be out here, to be out on the river. This is real life and we got to come out and help clean the river.” Real life, indeed!

Check out our flickr file of photos from the day:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/8478409@N03/sets/72157622139374624/

Special thanks to St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District for donating the dumpster and to Crown Excell for delivering it.

And, as always, thanks to Columbia Bottom Conservation Area for giving us permission to run our event out of their awesome ramp. This area is a gem – featuring seasonal wetlands, bottomland forest and wet prairies, it is a haven for migrating waterfowl, amphibians, small mammals and deer and pollinating insects. And it’s part of a much larger (and growing) complex of public lands managed for wildlife in the Confluence Greenway area.

Here’s a little piece of news about Columbia Bottom: a local developer is considering putting in a casino and resort complex just south of this amazing wetland and floodplain resource. For more information, check out the Belleville Daily News story:
http://www.bnd.com/news/state/story/877841.html

Trash Splash!

Confluence Trash Bash
March 28, 2009
Columbia Bottom Conservation Area
Text by Steve Schnarr

note: see photos taken by MDC media specialist Dan Zarlenga hosted on our flickr photo site by clicking here.

This was the third year that the Confluence Partnership, together with Trailnet, has hosted a clean-up in the Confluence region. Previously, they had focused on the area around the Old Chain of Rocks bridge – a signature Trailnet project that links Illinois and Missouri with a bike and pedestrian bridge. We either brought one boat to help, or in the case of flooding last year, a trailer to haul trash on land.

This year, thanks to a growing list of partners including the St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District.(MSD), the clean-up expanded to include several watersheds throughout the north St. Louis region, including Maline Creek, Watkins Creek, Coldwater Creek and Des Peres Creek. MSD wanted to support an area-wide clean-up to meet their Phase 2 EPA requirements.

Soon, Marc Clemens of Trailnet organized an awesome list of partners to lead sites throughout the area. We beefed up our participation to two boats, and led a Missouri River clean-up out of Columbia Bottom Conservation Area. Andy Tappmeyer, a biologist with Columbia Bottom, brought his boat to help as well, and MDC’s Ron Cooper brought a Bobcat to the site. Not to mention, Mike Clark from Big Muddy Adventures brought out his massive "Clipper" canoe to take a group out to Duck Island on the Mississippi.

Unfortunately, the weather was not good. It was cold, it rained all morning. At times the wind whipped up whitecaps on the river. But the amazing thing was that all of the volunteers that signed up to go on the river showed up. Even more! Although organizers anticipated an amazing 500 volunteers, 330 showed up in the frigid rain. Amazing!

We put 42 people on the river, supplied with trash bag ponchos and little else. There was some serious shivering, but no one declined to go on the river. Even though we cut the river trip short a little, these people did some serious work. Most of our volunteers were from Washington University Alpha Phi Omega service fraternity… and their positive attitude and hard work were inspiring. We were also joined by a great group of Missouri American Water employees.

The weather made Steve Nagle comment, “I’m calling it the Trash Splash”.

We were also joined with a bunch of good friends from past clean-ups. They worked on cleaning up the “small” stuff from an old farm dump on the new Cora Island Unit of the Big Muddy National Fish & Wildlife Refuge, a piece acquired in part to a partnership between the Trust for Public Lands and the Confluence Partnership. Plus, they gathered dozens of bags of plastic from several drift piles deposited last year.

The final trash haul, after lunch, was brutal. We were extremely lucky to have a good crew of River Relief pros show up. Expert boat drivers were Melanie Cheney, Anthony Pettit, Jeff "Swims with Boots On" Barrow & me. Everyone took a turn getting blown away on the river and we made quick work of the trash haul. Other amazing crew members were: Joe, Allison & Hannah Kellenberger, Joe Engeln, Nick Recker.

We think we got about a ton of trash, including this stuff:
6 55-gallon metal drums
1 Coast Guard buoy
1 hot water heater
2 metal gas tanks
2 tractor tires
18 car & truck tires
51 large trash bags (OK, I admit it...it's a complete guess...)
assorted scrap metal
1 gallon of marine varnish

As soon as we could wrap it up and drop off our scrap metal and tractor tires, we booked it back to Columbia, hoping to avoid the predicted snow. Luckily, we were one of the only places in the state that didn’t get any. Everyone made it back safely and, as far as I know, no one got sick. The Trash Splash rocked!

We were sponsored by: Missouri American Water, Great Rivers Greenway District and St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District. Thank you!!!!

How Do You Spell Relief?

Confluence Watershed Festival and River Clean-up

September 12-13

Columbia Bottom Conservation Area

text by Mike Clark, photos by Tom Ball & Ruthie Moccia

(blogmaster's note: Mike Clark is proprietor of Big Muddy Adventures, a canoe guide and outfitter that does educational paddling trips on the stretch of Missouri River between Hermann and the Confluence as well as the Mississippi. This piece was part of his River Dispatch series and is republished with permission. Find out more at www.2muddy.com)

The mantra is simple, Leave No Trace. And to that end, we pick up trash.... ours, yours and everyone’s we find, removing it from the drift piles, bottom lands, sand bars, all remnants of the rising and falling rivers, We do this on every trip, and annually, we make our connection with those who do it the best.

In September, we spent a weekend with the Missouri River Relief crew, at the annual Columbia Bottoms Cleanup.

It began Friday morning with a Festival of Learning, an event that Mark Twain would heartily approve of.... “Don’t let school get in the way of your education.”

We arrived to find rows of tents, displays and hands-on exhibits, each providing a unique link of learning about the river, all spread out on the parking lot of the Columbia Bottoms Boat Ramp, By 10 AM, the raw curiosity of hundreds of boys and girls was bubbling like the water at the wing dike. . The Missouri River Reliefers greeted students from Hazelwood School District. Using a well-designed workbook to help them make connections, the kids moved wide eyed and cheerful from station to station.
Mike Clark puts a group of Hazelwood School District students through the paces in his giant Clipper canoe. photo by Ruthie Moccia

For our part, BMA established a tight little canoe camp overlooking the Mighty Missouri and conducted a canoe workshop. Each group of students arrived with a multitude of questions. "Yo, Canoe man. What dat for?" "How you hold dat?" Then they climbed aboard the Clipper for dry land training. We practiced and practiced until their paddling technique was perfected, all in hopeful preparation for the day when they come along on a real BMA river adventure.

The Learning Festival day concluded with a Full Moon Float, six members of the Missouri River Relief crew gathering in the Clipper for a journey into the sublime. The midnight paddle and sand bar swim included an offering... a cell phone, forgotten in a pocket and submerged during a swan dive. A cell phone skipping contest was proposed but quickly shouted down, instead, a new version of the “message in a bottle.” and so it was planned... putting a cell phone in a bottle, with only enough battery for one call, and upon discovery somewhere near the Gulf, the instructions for a one time only speed dial, whereby the message that contains the answer to... “How do you spell relief?”

After a fun night of river rat camp, Saturday dawned with perfect river rat conditions for the Confluence Clean Up. Again, the River Relief Crew performed expertly, enlisting hundreds of folks to the cause. By late afternoon, two ginormous dumpsters were filled with the waste and want not of humanity. Thousands and thousands of plastic bottles. Literally, tons of tires, auto parts, appliances, gathered on the river by volunteers, then dumped on the ramp from the bowels of the River Relief plate boats, and finally hauled up to the dumpsters for future relocation, sadly, to a landfill. The enormity of the task is always overshadowed by the goodness of the people who come to help.

Our contribution that day was the “Cleanup by Canoe trip”. Six strangers, three strong women and three muddy men, found themselves paddling together into the Confluence, landing, walking the bank, filling bag after bag of shite, then piling it high above the gunnels, and finally, paddling to the Access. From strangers to friends, all within the span of three humble hours of service. All good. Check out www.riverrelief.org

Confluence Thank Yous

Confluence Watershed Festival & River Clean-up
September 12-13, 2008
Columbia Bottom Conservation Area
photos by Melanie Cheney & Scot Heidbrink

Our wonderful weekend at the Confluence would not have been possible without the generosity and hard work of these sponsors and partners. A Big Muddy Thanks to all of you!

Major Sponsors
Missouri Department of Natural Resources
Missouri American Water (an indispensible help at the Watershed Festival too!)
Great Rivers Greenway District (and donated reusable water bottles for the cleanup!)

Sponsors
Ameren UE
Americorps
Anheuser-Busch
Bass Pro Shop
EarthShare of Missouri
Fred Weber, Inc.
Rick Holton
Missouri Department of Conservation
National Park Service
Pat Jones
River Kids (donated the H2Orchestra for the Festival!)
Rivermiles LLC
St. Louis Metropolitan Sewer District (and donated two dumpsters!)
St. Louis/Jefferson Solid Waste Mgmt. Dist.
U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service.
Waterways Council

Partners

Big Muddy Adventures (free canoe rides and canoe clean-up!)
Columbia Bottom Conservation Area (the hosts with the most!)
Confluence Greenway - Trailnet
Dominos Pizza - Blackjack
EcoWorks Unlimited (Karla Wilson!!!)
Hazelwood School District
Mighty #211 Stream Team
Missouri Stream Team
Missouri River Communities Network
Spanish Lake Fire Dept.
Tri-Rinse, Inc. (took our tires for free!)