Hundreds of volunteers braved chilly temperatures on Saturday to participate in the Great Texas River Clean-up, an initiative that also involves municipalities and businesses along the entire 90-mile length of the spring-fed San Marcos River.
While the day of the cleanup is obvious within the city — canoes and kayaks are in the river and people with bags of trash are walking the banks of the river and its tributaries— what goes on along the lower river is largely hidden from public view.
Tom Goynes, proprietor of San Marcos River Retreat, said there were about 100 people — many Texas Water Safari-hardened paddlers, who volunteered their time on the stretch of the river from Stokes Park to Gonzales, where the San Marcos merges with the Guadalupe River.
Volunteers who pulled her out of the river named her “Clementine.” The cleanup also yielded a Santa and a snowman.
Goynes said he did not know the weight of the trash collected. “I have an easier time of guessing volume,” he said. All told, he said, the effort filled many dumpsters.
“We had at least a couple of canoes on every section of river all the way to Gonzales. And these people all put in a full day. Many of them missed the barbecue because they were either too tired or too cold. Some of them put in 8-hour days,” Goynes said, referencing the meal he and wife Paula hosted at their campground after the cleanup ended.
Bags of aluminum cans that probably numbered in the hundreds were pulled out of the river, along with tires of various sizes and even tire rims, furniture and other discarded items. Collected by people in canoes and kayaks, the trash was then taken to dumpsters positioned all along the river’s course. Noted Texas fishing guide Kevin Hutchinson provided an invaluable service with his inflated raft. “He used his raft as a garbage scow,” Goynes said. “He carried the trash — mostly mud-filled beer cans — that the canoeists had picked up through Cottonseed rapids, saving the problems that could have happened if a canoe had overturned.”
As usual, aluminum cans figured heavily in the trash collected, and they will be recycled. Other items dredged up by volunteers last Saturday ranged from broken furniture to basketballs and other sports equipment.
The river also yielded some unexpected items including a creepy doll nicknamed “Clementine” after volunteers pulled her from the water between Stokes Park and Goynes’ property.
Dianne Wassenich of the San Marcos River Foundation noted that participation in the effort grew this year to include Plum Creek in Kyle, which empties into the San Marcos River.
“Once the final numbers are gathered on the amounts of trash and recycling processed by the city of San Marcos and several counties, plus Green Guy Recycling, we will summarize it in our newsletter,” Wassenich said, going on to thank Amy Kirwin and Colleen Cook of Keep SM Beautiful, Goynes and Green Guy.
Though it won’t be included in Wassenich’s totals, the cleanup actually continued. On Monday, Caldwell County sent a dump truck and backhoe to clean up an illegal dump near the river in Stairtown, and Goynes said volunteers will return to polish that off on Friday.
