By Melissa Hendrickson

 

In all the different places I’ve lived, getting tied into the local mountain biking group is a surefire way to make friends. Show up to the weekly group ride every Wednesday evening, and you instantly have new buddies to ride with. Some of them might even become your real friends.

Rolling into summer this year, I decided I wanted to apply the same strategy to the BHA packout events I was going to host. I picked the first Tuesday of the month, mostly based on my families schedule, but also that it didn’t interfere with the trail building days our local mountain bike group hosts. I hoped this strategy would help with commitment issues I see so often with hosting a weekend event in the summer: people are over committed for precious weekend slots by the time the snow is barely off the ground. And maybe I’d get to make some new friends in the process.

The other reason I was interested in this format is there are a lot of public land “trashy spots”, as my son calls them, that could use a little helping hand. They don’t require dedicating a whole weekend day to cleaning up, but an hour or two can make a huge difference. Summer evenings are long in North Idaho, so picking up trash for an hour could be followed by a leisurely social hour.

The North Idaho Public Land Packout Pop-Up Series Presented by onX was born. Next up was to get the trashy spots sorted out. I wanted to spread these out a bit over north Idaho to include a wider range of folks, but I only half joke that all the events I host are within a 20 mile radius of our house. So obviously the first packout location was only seven miles down the road.

This also meant it was easy to recruit a couple of neighbors by word of mouth and through the local Facebook group. We had eight people show up for the first event, including two I’d never met before. New friends!

The group spent about an hour and a half picking up three pick-up truck beds full of trash, all while swatting hordes of mosquitoes. Fortunately, charcoal and citronella candles reduced the amount of blood loss while we roasted brats and chatted with friends afterwards.

Before the series started, I made up punch cards, with the intent that everyone would get a punch for every event they attended. Every punch got your name entered into a drawing at the end of the series for a prize. A quick search of the arts and crafts section at the thrift store yielded several punches that fit exactly with my vision.

One of the hardest things at the beginning was choosing spots, especially farther away from my home radius. For the second event, I tried to stretch the distance, but didn’t quite make it: it was 19.5 miles from the house. I do get points for being in a different county though!

This clean-up was two dispersed shooting spots on National Forest lands. We had nine people this time, including a brand new BHA member and now new friend!

For the last event, I finally spread my wings! A BHA member and friend asked if he could help host an event in the Coeur d’Alene area, which is about two hours from where I live north of Sandpoint. He found the trashy spot and organized how to get the trash out and disposed of, I brought the supplies and the hotdogs.

Ten people spent a little over an hour filling his truck up with trash from a shooting/dispersed camping spot. Ever since starting to host packouts two years ago, I’ve had the golden trash bucket. Whoever finds the most unusual piece of trash, chosen by popular vote, gets memorialized on the golden trash bucket and a small prize. This evening took the cake with the highest concentration of weird things found to date: a bin of shoes, a giant teddy bear, and a blank journal.

Thus concluded the first summer of the North Idaho Public Land Packout Pop-Up Series. I enjoyed this format and felt we covered a lot of ground. It was slow going at first getting trashy spots sorted out, but now I have several banked for next year. And, a few new friends who know to drop an onX pin this fall during hunting season and share it with me for next summer’s series.