Progress, but we didn't even make a dent.

Today was the first time that I participated as volunteer with the Friends of The Wissahickon. 

It was a fairly positive experience albeit I did become frustrated towards the end of the day. There were massive amounts of garbage and litter on both sides of the Creek at Devil's Pool.
The sad thing is - that the FOW had already cleaned that very area twice within the last two weeks. Volunteers were told that the garbage count of what we were collecting had slightly improved and was actually much less than it had been previously.  That's hard to imagine. We hauled out approximately 12 or more bags of trash, not including the recycling. 
The photo here - is part of what we "walked into" - not what we removed.  There was garbage everywhere. 

Even while our small group of volunteers collected garbage, several groups of people continued to not only walk past us with their pool and barbeque supplies, but with apathy and entitlement, set up camp and started having their parties anyway. 

The FOW regularly cleans Wissahickon Valley Park, especially the Devil's Pool area since it has become a hot-spot for visitors and large-scale unauthorized swim parties.  Many people like me had never officially volunteered although we clean up garbage on our own personal visits to the park, on a much smaller scale. 

Even though the FOW voluntarily cleans up the littering, this doesn't mean that it should be expected of them to do it all of the time. It is everyone's responsibility to clean up after themselves. I am told that there are plenty of volunteer opportunities with the FOW that one can find on their Events page. I plan to join the clean-up crew again. 

Unfortunately, this photo does not even represent a fraction of the garbage and litter that we encountered, let alone saw and couldn't access.  I chose to use it for this update due to the irony of it ... the audacity of it ... the disrespect. 

We have a long way to go before we can make official progress with this petition but we are off to a good start.  We are close to 700 signatures. 

I just want to say thank you to everyone who has already signed and shared. Please continue to do so, so that we can raise awareness for this extremely important environmental cause to Save The Wissahickon Creek.