With a couple of my outdoor adventuring associates sidelined by the sickness that swept through so many seasonal celebrations and family functions over the holiday break, we were forced to find an alternative activity to our annual First Day trek plans.
I decided to stay close to home and start what could be a new tradition. I armed myself with a pocketful of plastic grocery store bags and headed out into the woods behind my house looking for litter or anything else that did not belong along my path.
I am happy to report that the trip did not net as much material as I expected, and I came home with a couple of empty bags still in my jacket. I did mark one spot in my mind where I would need to return with some heftier disposal tools. At a small, former roadside dump site I was able to pack out a few parts of a plastic Big Wheel toddler tricycle, but I had to leave the bigger chunks for another day. The spot also had an old gas-powered string trimmer and some destroyed electronic components that were aging along with the pile.
Mostly I picked up plastic water and soft drink bottles, and aluminum cans in a variety of vintages. A busted, blue plastic toolbox once neatly held an assortment of sockets and wrenches, but now its compartments were filled with mud and muck that nearly outweighed its former contents.
After exiting the woods at the old gravel road, I continued my circuit through city streets. Fortunately, I found limited trash on the roadsides too, but the empty cups, bottles and fast food burger containers filled another two more grocery bags before I made it home.
Still, I am left to wonder what compels people to toss their garbage out of their vehicles. It can’t be too far to travel to their homes or a public trash receptacle along the way. Some people may contend that by picking up after the litterers, I am encouraging the behavior, because they know someone will remove their rubbish.
I see it in the opposite—maybe overly optimistic—way, with hope that they will see clean areas and not want to spoil them. I am confident that the roadside dump was not all piled up by the same person. Rather, I suspect that once people recognized the spot as a potential discard area, they decided to do the same.
Along those lines, I think about an admonition I read in an outdoor magazine several years ago. It said that hikers should not dispose of food waste along their way. A banana peel or orange rind left behind may indeed eventually decompose naturally, but in the meantime those items serve as a bright beacon to others that it’s OK to throw stuff on the ground.
The best thing I found on my hike I left hanging in the tree. A big, bald-faced hornet nest was built onto a branch. The cold weather allowed me to get close enough for a photo. The over-sized, abandoned home appears almost like a work of art dangling high above the path.
I hope we all get through 2026 healthy and well and return to our First Day Hike tradition in the future. The upcoming Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday on Jan. 19 is acknowledged as a national day of service. It would provide another opportunity for a litter walk to clean up our community.
Thanks to alert Leader reader Karen Wentzel, I found out that my first First Day Hike was 10 years later than I originally reported in the Outdoor Outlook on Dec. 24. According to the date stamp on my computer photo files, the picture I included with the column was created on Jan. 1, 2004. Karen recognized herself in the picture, and her hiking companion Buddy, a big and beautiful black Labrador retriever.
Buddy, she said, was born in 2011, so there was no way the photo was from 2004. Also she remembered that morning’s Mastodon State Historic Site hike specifically. After she and Buddy returned home, he injured himself while chasing a squirrel in his backyard. They spent their New Year’s Day with the veterinarian. She said that memorable holiday was in 2014.
I checked my other references from that hike and even though all the pictures from that day say 2004, the story I wrote is correctly filed in a folder marked 2014.
John Winkelman has been writing about outdoors news and issues in Jefferson County for more than 30 years and was the Associate Editor for Outdoor Guide Magazine. If you have story ideas for the Leader outdoor news page, e-mail ogmjohnw@aol.com, and you can find more outdoor news and updates at johnjwink.com.