 By Nancy Coggins April 18, 2005
Volunteers from 6-years-old and up, including Boy Scouts and one man who came from Prince of Wales, worked at several sites along this road clearing them of innumerable items such as empty shells, broken "clay" pigeons that weren't made of real clay for the sake of the environment, broken bottle glass, old TVs, shot-up aluminum cans, Styrofoam, plastic bags, plastic ammunition boxes, old tires, and wire cords. Added to the mess, there were nails remaining when pallets were burned for bonfires. One van suffered a flat tire from one of those nails. Also found over the rocky cliffs were items such as a washing machine, big tanks and a rusty table which men wearing hard hats hooked onto the winch of an A1 Towing truck to hoist up to be added to the pile of trash. Two skirted girls, who were very good rock climbers, helped bring up the smaller items such as an old bike and other unnameable scraps. Ketchikan Gateway Borough Code Enforcement Officer Jerry Cegelske ran a smooth operation from supplying yellow BP plastic refuse bags to a Tyler Services portable toilet. Certificates such as a free Blockbuster movie and Shear Magic tanning sessions were tucked into an old tire or other piece of garbage by Cegelske to be found by the clean-up participants, and a cookout lunch at Ward Lake was provided.  Officer Jerry Cegelske pose with "bagged" trash... Photo by Gretchen Klein Toward the end of "Cleanup Ketchikan Day", a Tongass Sanitation truck came to collect the full yellow bags and Robert McRoberts' Dig It Construction large flatbed truck picked up the large, bulky, heavy pieces. By the end of the "Clean Up Ketchikan Day", many participants may have indeed felt that they hadn't had so much fun in a long time perhaps since their youth, and could have joined Richard Monrean in saying: "That was the most fun I've had since I was a kid!"
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