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.

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

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!!!!