My wish for you is a clean and enjoyable recreation experience, but if you come across this kind of stuff, please pay it forward for the next person and help take care of our great outdoors.

Multiple dump sites found along one road on the Yacolt Burn State Forest in SW WA. Friday, Nov 3rd, 2023.

Trash on our public lands is not acceptable and we all must step up to help keep our forests clean. It doesn't matter if it's at a target shooting location or anywhere else in the forest. We want nature to be natural.

I simply wanted an hour or two of peace and quiet in the woods. Far away from traffic, news and city trash. It turned out to be 6 hours of hard work!

Sorry for the crappy video footage. I wasn't planning on doing a video, or a cleanup for that matter, so I didn't take the good cameras. Just my old Samsung S8, which I gotta get a new one someday. The footage is compiled from private video texts I sent to my son throughout the day, via the Marco Polo app.

"If it didn't grow in the forest, it shouldn't be in the forest!"

Bill Cogley
Trash No Land

Thanks for all that you do Bill.
It’s a shame that people have to be SLOBS and make the rest of us look bad.

Roger that, Jim. This stuff only made the forest and the person who dumped it look bad. Not at any shooting sites, which is good.

In the 3 separate dumps, that had paperwork in them, I found the same persons name, complete with address, phone number and the business she owns (a motel in Portland). I took photos of that and emailed to DNR Police. I found her FB page and see that she posted 2 things yesterday, so I know she's alive and active on social media. She looks to be somewhere in her 60's. So, I don't readily suspect that she was the one who dumped it (especially when it's full of her personal and business documents). I'm leaning to think she may have hired someone who took the money and dumped in the forest instead.

I'm not too confident that DNR will pursue this or not. It would be nice to know how this actually happened. Guess we'll see.

I too have found boxes and paperwork with peoples addresses, sadly two were from Fort Lewis & DNR had no interest to receive the pics.

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Re: the multiple dumps I found last Friday;

I heard back from DNR Police in WA. He called the lady's phone number that we found on most of the trash in the 3 separate dump sites. Someone else has that phone number now.

The paperwork shows that she owns a motel in N. Portland, so he called. The lady sold the motel and has since moved to Florida.

So, that's where it stands for now. I'm not sure if any further investigation will happen.

My suspension, at this point, is perhaps the new owner cleaned out the storage room at the motel and paid someone to dump. Or, perhaps the lady had a storage unit and defaulted on her payments, so the storage business cleaned out her space. Another thought is that she may have stored things at a relatives house and they got rid of it.

We may never know.

...but it was a jolly good try!

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Another year in the books. You all did good and are to be admired! You helped save our places to shoot and restore the good name of Stewardship in our great outdoors!

"Itchy Finger" and "Biggy Brother" wish to say THANK YOU for a great year (even if they do look a little rough around the edges!).

#StewardshipKeepsItOpen, #shootership, #targetshooting, #publiclands, #publiclandowner