The Three Forks Snoqualmie Valley Emergency Response Group spent their morning helping the community on July 22. But this time it wasn’t about emergency response or survival education, it was helping clean up more than 900 pounds of garbage dumped in the woods.

The group decided to clean up an area along the North Fork Road behind Mount Si known as a county line, a place popular for people to go for camping and shooting. Mark Marinos, founder and president of the group, said that members of the group had been talking about all the garbage left up there and decided to organize a time to go out and clean it themselves.

“We go back there quite a bit and camping weekend and over time the place is kind of inundated with garbage,” he said. “A couple of years ago, someone even dumped an old RV.”

The group took about two hours on the Sunday morning to collect all the garbage and load it up into the two pickup trucks they brought up to the site. They started at 8:30 a.m. and were all packed up by about 10:30 a.m., Marinos said.

The stuff dumped out there was mostly camping materials, he said, plastic bottles, road signs, shotgun shells, stuff people take back out to go shoot at.

Once everything was loaded up they took it down to the Cedar Falls Transfer Station to properly dispose of it.

The group, he said, had planned on doing this more often if necessary, taking trips to go clean up spaces that everyone should be able to enjoy.

“It’s absolutely our pleasure, we’d been talking about doing this for quite some time,” Marinos said. “We kind of plan on it being a twice a year deal, depending upon how bad it gets … I don’t think anyone wants to go outside in these beautiful areas in the Pacific Northwest and see some trash.”

If you go out to camp, you should always bring along some sort of garbage bag to collect all of the trash you bring up, he said. Being able to clean up what you bring would make the environment a better place for everybody.

The Three Forks Snoqualmie Valley Emergency Response Group promotes education and training in survival skills and emergency preparedness. the group meets monthly and holds various lessons and talks with members or guests speaking about their particular area of expertise. Tying knots, land navigation, surviving in the woods, and weapons safety are some of the things they have covered in their meetings.

For more information on the group, visit www.3sv-erg.org.