Giving Tuesday with HER Trails

To celebrate Giving Tuesday this year we’re diving into our partnership with HER Trails for a morning clean up run. The clean up run is in support of future generations to give guidance on leaving it better than we found it whether that’s right outside your door or in the heart of our national treasures, the national parks.

We started the hike at the Los Leones Canyon trailhead right outside of LA. The run lasted about an hour and a half, hiking 1.5 miles up and running 1.5 miles down. During that time, we would stop to pick up any trash we found on the trail to help clean up these habitats. This included discarded clothes, soda cups, and many plastic water bottles. Once arriving at the lookout area of the trail, we came upon the most amount of trash, ending our hike with 5 clean up bags full of trash and 1 of recycling.
 
It’s all about these ‘feel good’ moments when we and the local ecosystem, can benefit from our clean up on these trails and keep our mission possible by leaving the parks better than we found them. There’s so many ways to get out in your community and take care of the land we’re on whether it’s a local park or one a part of the American national park system. When we reached the top of the trailhead where the lookout point was located, we had some comments made to us similar to, “we didn’t even notice there was trash on the trail”, it wasn’t until after they saw us picking up the trash that they began to notice how much there really was. One person even started to pick up trash themselves.
 

A few small ways to minimize the trash we find on the trails to heighten not only your visits to the parks, but the visitor experience as a whole:
 
1. Use a reusable water bottle like this one from our site.

2. Bring along a clean up kit in your pack next time you take a walk and curate your own parks project by helping to leave it better. The clean up kits are designed for more than just a one-time use so make sure to reuse next time you’re out there!

3. Be a part of the stewardship toward our public lands and America’s national parks, the more others see us actively caring, the more the rest of the world may want to take action.

Thanks so much to the team at HER Trails for helping us continue to make these changes and momentums possible. Let’s continue this mission both inside and outside of the national parks as we step into a new year! If you’re interested in volunteering in the national parks and don’t know where to start, here’s a few websites to check out: The National Park Foundation, NPCA (also known as The National Parks Conservation Association), and nationalparks.org. The National Park Service and Parks Project thank you.