Bee Canyon Clean-up – Cari DeVore

Have you been up Bee Canyon lately? If you have, you’ve probably noticed that all the canyons people use for target practice have been surprisingly clean over the last year, but not perfect. This year the club once again took part in the clean-up of Bee Canyon, which was hosted by the Forest Service. There were many volunteers representing different entities that have a vested interest in keeping our public lands open. We took care of two areas this year, and the cleaning went quite quick this year. I think most of us really showed up to get a chance to take the adopt a trail, and enjoy Idyllwild at Dan’s house.
The clean-up started at 9:00 am, all the volunteers met at the entrance to Bee Canyon, Stacy Wellman introduced all the different volunteer groups. For the Hemet Jeep Club we had quite a few participants including Mike and Carol Ledbetter; Bob and Lei Lani Kuester; Dan Wilson; Steven Rapata; Bob Ogilvie; Wayne and Angela Schandor; Cici Luceno; Rick Hodson; Darren Weatherby; Kody, Amanda, Wyatt, and Luke Kirch; Cayleigh Epstein; Matt, Cari, Kiley, and Charlie Devore. We headed to a canyon armed with our rakes, shovels, and trash bags. This year we took out mostly small trash, and made quick work of the canyon. It only took about 45 minutes at our first location and we were done. Bob and Lei Lani had gone up ahead to the furthest spot that was to be cleaned that day, and again we were done in about 30 minutes. Stacy had asked Dan if we would put out a sign temporarily closing the rest of Bee Canyon, this gave us an opportunity to run the adopt a trail. It really is an ever changing trail, part that were hard have gotten easier, and the little rits have gotten deeper. Overall the trail is clean and in good shape. Of course it’s also always a great trail to run, and the location makes it even better. After we ran the trail Dan invited the group to his house for pizza. It’s hard to say no to hanging out in the pines and enjoying pizza from Idyllwild Pizza Company. Everybody did an awesome job cleaning up the canyon, and as much as cleaning up somebody else’s mess is a bummer, it sure is nice to have pride in knowing we helped to make our backyard look better. Thank you Dan for always opening up your home to all of us, and thank you to all who participated. Maybe next year we’ll be able to clean it even faster to spend more time enjoying each others company at the club’s unofficial mountain hangout.