The next time you admire the pristine natural beauty the Valley has to offer, remember the group of folks who help keep it that way.

“There’s a reason it looks decent around North Bend and clean, because we’re on it, constantly,” said Wade Holden. “Some of these areas would get totally hammered if we didn’t keep it up,” he said.

Wade, 47, a retired fencing contractor, is the founder and executive director of Friends of the Trail, a grassroots, nonprofit organization dedicated to removing garbage from the state’s public lands and waterways. While there are many trail-building organizations and groups, there is only one dedicated to trail cleanup – Friends of the Trail. It is the only organization in Washington state equipped to handle illegal dumping and litter problems on a regular basis.

Friends of the Trail is celebrating its 10th anniversary this month after hauling literally thousands upon thousands of tons of litter, appliances, vehicles and other man-made junk of every description out of the state’s wilderness areas.

Now a busy organization with a board of directors that works on cleanup projects all over the state, the origin of Friends of the Trail began on a camping trip in the early fall of 1995.

Wade and his wife Tania had been camping in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness for several days with their two llamas. Returning home on the Middle Fork Road, they reached the end of an exhausting day’s journey. “Of course the Middle Fork, all the way up and down and through there, used to be just a stinking, terrible hell-hole, it was just bad, bad stuff everywhere up there. People had been dumping on it for 30-40 years.”

Wade spied a picturesque spot with a magnificent view near the road where they could make camp. There was just one problem: it was filled with trash. “Literally waist-deep,” he said.

Despite the presence of the sea of litter, they were both so fatigued that Wade managed to talk his wife into spending the night. After unloading the llamas, they spent a discouraging evening surrounded by junk. “How can people be so insensitive to the environment?” they asked themselves.

Using a washing machine as an ad-hoc table, the Holdens wondered what they could do about what was clearly a chronic problem. “I asked my wife, ‘how could you ever get a handle on this?'” said Wade.

The forest service, which had previously organized once-a-year cleanup drives, was going through budget cuts at the time, and the Holdens knew that government support would be only minimal, at best, for such an endeavor.

Before leaving on the trip, Wade had watched a television program that had documented roadside “chain gangs” in Georgia. These modern chain gangs were being used to pick up garbage.

Wade was a farm and ranch fencing contractor, and had an employee who had gotten into trouble with the law and needed to work off his volunteer service hours.

It was there in the marred beauty of the campsite that Wade and his wife put the two ideas together. “The light bulb went off,” he said.

Upon returning home, the Holdens plunged into research, making phone calls and working out the details. They did not have a computer at the time, so Tania went to the library and got a copy of “The Northwest Grant Givers Guide.” They began applying for grants and organized their first cleanup efforts the following March.

Their initial efforts drew the attention of the local news media. This, in turn, interested several local government officials, including current King County Council Chairman Larry Phillips, who has remained an enthusiastic supporter of Friends of the Trail.

“I’ve always been one of them kind of guys; I don’t believe in begging for nothing. We operate very, very efficiently with what money we do have,” said Holden.

So efficiently, in fact, that the organization’s operational overhead is under 14 percent. Tania continues to do all the bookkeeping and grant writing for Friends of the Trail. She does this in addition to her 40-hour workweek for the city of Snoqualmie. “She’s the brainy one,” said Wade, who deeply appreciates his wife’s efforts.

“We almost always get the grants we apply for, but then again, a lot of people have learned [that] there is a real need for what we do, there really is,” he said.

The first major obstacle for Friends of the Trail was an extensive cleanup of the Middle Fork of the Snoqualmie River, which lasted two and a half years. Wade persuaded the U.S. Army Reserve to use a CH-47 “Chinook” heavy-left helicopters to pick up waterlogged vehicles that had been dumped in some especially precarious locations along the river. All told, Friends of the Trail has removed nearly 90 vehicles from the area over the years.

These days, they work on projects all over the state nearly every weekend, except for major holidays. Two crews usually work at the same time in two different locations, with Wade taking one and his one full-time assistant the other. The group relies on grants and some funding from the Department of Ecology’s litter fee program. Its workforce is composed entirely of volunteers and community service workers.

They do much of their work in South King County, Pierce County and also up into Snohomish County, but have worked around the state. This past year, they worked extensively in Thurston, Lewis and Cowlitz counties for the forest service, around and between the wilderness areas surrounding Mount Adams, Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens. They have also worked in the Spokane area, near the state’s border with Idaho, and up into Whatcom County, near the border with Canada.

“We’ve always taken on the most difficult projects, and … we may pick up a few candy wrappers and pop cans around the park, but that’s not the bulk of our work. We do little projects as well as big ones,” said Wade.

Wade is proud of the fact that Friends of the Trail has not had to rely on public assistance through membership fees or by campaigning for public donations.

“We don’t discourage anybody from sending us donations in the mail, but we raise all our money through Earth Share of Washington and through workplace-giving campaigns. We survive on money that we find through grants and everything else, so we’re pretty self-sufficient. It’s a big nut to crack with what funding we operate on, it really is,” said Wade.

Friends of the Trail works for a variety of local and state agencies and organizations, including the U.S. Forest Service, the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, the Department of Fish and Wildlife, King County Solid Waste Division and the Bureau of Land Management.

The multiagency ownership of Washington’s public lands would make it difficult for one county agency to operate, making Friends of the Trail, an all-volunteer group, ideally suited for the task. Many agencies do not have the resources, time, or access they need in order to literally pick up trash and haul junk out of the wilderness, but that’s where Friends of the Trail comes in.

While regular volunteers can become overwhelmed, Wade says the people who have been sentenced to community service hours by the King County District Court and other local court systems are ideally suited for the kind of work the group does. Community service workers can often have hundreds of hours to work off – typically up 240 hours – and it can be difficult finding opportunities to do that sort of work on the Eastside. Food banks and weeding the grounds of public buildings do not usually take up enough time for most people.

“I don’t ever ask them what they did to get in trouble, and I don’t ever aggravate them in any way,” said Wade. “I think a lot of people appreciate that.” “There’s a lot of organizations out there [or] public service opportunities that, the first thing they want to know is, ‘what did you get in trouble for?'” “I’ll take anybody, and I’ll take them anytime they want to work.” Holden works to accommodate and assist his workers, as long as they apply themselves.

Although the mission of Friends of the Trail has expanded in scope to include