Tobiah Barry, Wenatchee, left, and Andrew Jeffery, Cheney, gather glass and garbage left on the east bank of the Columbia River about a mile north of the Pipeline Pedestrian Bridge last March.
Tobiah Barry, Wenatchee, left, and Andrew Jeffery, Cheney, gather glass and garbage left on the east bank of the Columbia River about a mile north of the Pipeline Pedestrian Bridge last March.
EAST WENATCHEE — A group of teenagers scoured a small section of the east bank of the Columbia River last March, picking up garbage as part of a volunteer effort.
Pathfinders, a youth department of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, brought 14 youth and adult supervisors from around the Pacific Northwest to the Wenatchee Valley for a week-long volunteer camp.
On one day, about half of them went to the river a mile north of the Pipeline Pedestrian Bridge. The water had receded to expose garbage in wet mud along the shore. Eric Barber of Wenatchee brought his inflatable boat to access hard-to-reach areas. The four members assigned to him boated from place to place where they beached the boat and cleaned the shore.
Barber and his wife Amber had spotted litter along the river while walking the Apple Capital Recreation Loop Trail on Monday and decided to include the cleanup as one of the projects.
“We didn’t bring enough garbage bags,” Eric said as he piled what he had as full bags in the front of his boat. Some of the heavier, metal objects they had to leave behind.
With all of the other projects on their schedule, they could only devote a few hours to the river cleanup.
Along with this effort, the group had been painting a church, helping elderly people with yard cleanup, and working on landscaping projects.
I was born in Wenatchee, went to Eastmont High School, graduated from the University of Washington with a communications degree in journalism. I have a wife and three children.
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