Cleaning Up North Fork Salt Creek

From volunteer (and board treasurer) Joe Ryan

On Monday morning, May 20th, I joined FLM’s lake cleanup guru Richard Harris for a North Fork Salt Creek cleanup. We launched our canoe off McGowan Road a few miles above the Pine Grove boat ramp. Our goal? Remove some of the floating trash that accumulates in mini log jams in the creek. The North Fork extends well into Brown County, beyond Nashville, and trash washes downstream into Lake Monroe. While parts of the creek are navigable, at some places log jams block the creek, making access for trash removal difficult and potentially dangerous. We were targeting an area that we believed to be accessible and looking in particular for a big truck tire reported by community member Bruce Anderson.

We found the tire right off, but it was a beautiful day and the high water (4.5 feet above normal pool) made it easy to get around, so we took our time exploring. The canoe was perfect. We came up on what looked like solid log jams, but they turned out to be mainly loose floating branches, so we easily poled our way through to pull up next to our targets — bottles, decayed styrofoam, basketballs, rubber flip-flops, and so forth.

When we had the belly of the canoe loaded with this junk, we turned back to collect the big boy, still on its steel rim. We had worried about trying to get it on board, but instead we just floated it back to our put-in point, like pushing a baby stroller. Naturally, the clunky rubber galoshes I was wearing to keep my feet dry caught the canoe's gunwale as I stepped out and sent me into the stream a foot from dry land. But no matter, we bagged the junk and rolled the tire up to the side of the road for DNR to pick up.

Besides keeping two big bags of trash out of the lake, our little adventure proved the concept. We look forward to doing more of it as conditions permit.