Litterbugs

Is there a worse character flaw than being a litterbug? Seriously, I’ve met racists with redeeming qualities, but have never respected or liked a litterbug. And I do not mean to belittle the seriousness of racism, but I do see racism as more of a fear of others as opposed to the litterbug attitude that shows a complete disregard for everyone but themself. Ask yourself, what do you think when you casually see someone throw litter on the ground with no intention of ever picking it up? I think lazy, selfish, slob and want nothing more to do with them. They obviously lack respect for other people and beauty. They are too lazy to deal with their own trash, and either do not even think about it, or expect others to clean up after them. I’ve noticed that as a character flaw, littering is generally just the tip of the iceberg, and is indicative of a mountain of other heinous character flaws (think greediness, sloth and other major deadly sins).

I’m writing about litterbugs because this past weekend a litterbug marred the beauty of a hunting trip I went on with Mike P and Preston V. While hiking up into the high country to camp the night prior to hunting we found that someone had discovered our ‘secret trail’. They had used a machete to clear it out and had blazed the trail with trash. I really do not mind that someone discovered our trail – more power to people that hike to hunt. But the trash bothered me. They had used ‘Mountain Dew’ cans and plastic bottled water containers to mark the trail every couple of hundred yards – putting the bottles and cans onto to tree/bush limbs at about head height. Eventually they ran out of these and started to simply tie plastic shopping bags to bushes. We also found part of their goat hunting tag (saw goat hair on the bushes from their trip down too), candy wrappers, pop-tart wrappers, and toilet paper all festooned along the trail. They left a trail of trash that we had to pick up and carry out for them. What’s amazing is that they felt a need to blaze the trail with trash after they had hacked out a tunnel an elephant could have followed home through the underbrush.

Now you may ask what’s the big deal about some trash in the backcountry. How were we inconvenienced other having to look at someone else’s trash and carry it out? No one was hurt right? And this is where you would be wrong. This type of litterbug hurts me as a hunter because the non-hunting public will lump us all together as slob hunters and might eventually restrict our hunting access. Worse still, most of the Kodiak Road system is private land and who wants litterbugs trespassing on their land? We are lucky they let us recreate on their land at all, and it would be perfectly reasonable for a private landowner to restrict access to their land if people are trashing it. I don’t litter or trash private or public lands, but I’d lose out because others do.

I tell you what – I will not mind if Nora and Stu ever do the ‘party-hearty’ at White Sands Beach thing, but if they leave their trash behind there will be Hell to pay from me. Patrick

Photos: No Place For Trash – Mike and Preston hiking out of the Blueberry Bowl. Bottom – our view at dawn when we started to glass for deer.