One gas can, two wallets, three bars of soap, four cardboard boxes, five pairs of underwear, six shoes, 11 pieces of rotten fast food, 21 glass beer bottles, 25 metal bottle caps, 32 clothing tags, 38 maxi pads and 72 pieces of dirty toilet paper.
This is only a small selection of what Jason Danoff and the Stewards of Sedona collected shortly after Memorial Day at a popular swimming spot in Oak Creek Canyon.
Danoff noticed that during the March and April shutdowns, with many other entertainment options closed, hoards of people that wouldn’t normally spend time outdoors were making their way into the canyon. Though they packed in, many times they didn’t pack out, or Forest Service trashcans overflowed and items blew away. With his local tour company, Trail Lovers Excursions, also temporarily closed, Danoff gathered his employees to clean up spots along the creek.
“The way it started, we were just picking up trash. Some, you know, rock climbing hippie dirtbags — as I would call our team of guides — and we decided to stay closed until June. All the other tour companies became open,” Danoff said. “We received a very small, but just enough emergency disaster loan. We didn’t get the PPP loan, so to keep our guides employed, we thought, ‘we don’t really want to lead tours yet, we don’t really want to attract people to Sedona yet, but we can do something positive for our community and we can get our guides back on the land.’”
Danoff said each of the guides racked up 200 community service hours accumulating bags and bags of trash along the creek’s red rocks and clear waters. After the guides posted photos of some of their finds to social media — including a negative pregnancy test and dozens of dirty diapers within a few feet of the creek — the posts “exploded,” and quarantined Sedonans begged to help. A weekly meetup group was formed in May, and the Stewards of Sedona was born.
By now there are lots of regulars every Tuesday, some getting up at dawn to travel from Phoenix to make it to the Indian Gardens parking lot by 7 a.m. From there, the Stewards get briefed by Danoff on that day’s plan and instructions, gather supplies he provides for them — including neon yellow roadwork vests, professional pickup claws, industry-sized trash bags, sanitizer, masks and many a glove — before breaking off into smaller groups and driving to designated clean-up areas along the creek.
On June 23, Michelle Grimm, sporting a purple “Don’t Be Trashy” shirt, and her pick-up partner Dana Cavanaugh, donning one that read “Don’t Be a Dirty Bird,” were pumped for that morning’s garbage gains.
“It’s actually, strangely, very rewarding , ” Cavanaugh said. “And the Forest Service has just been so grateful and appreciative.”
Even though the women have been picking up for weeks, the trash often returns to the same spots. But that doesn’t stop them.
“It’s kind of sad in a way,” Cavanaugh said. “But Michelle and I were talking last week and we actually get really inspired by, you know, getting out here…”
“…and what happens is people see us cleaning things up and its like a ripple effect,” Grimm added.
“People were bringing us trash at Grasshopper Point last week and they wanted to participate,” Cavanaugh said.
Danoff said that the Stewards picking up trash in front of others has an educational aspect.
“We’re also trying to play a little psychology here,” he said. “I want people to see volunteering. Because I think people holding trash bags and us doing this on busy weekends — just even seeing somebody picking up trash in front of you and your family — makes you suddenly aware of, ‘Hey this place is respected.’”
Danoff compared Oak Creek’s beautiful sites to a church, saying that if people see others caring for — or worshipping — the “sacred” land, so to speak, it will help them to realize that the land is deeply respected.
“So by us showing that sort of care for it and being forthright and actually proactive in front of families … it’s education. And education’s the most important part,” he said. “Also you know, not attacking people, not making people feel bad.”
Many kids also got involved in the pick-up, learning about the importance of caring for the land while having fun at the creek. First-time Steward and new Sedona resident Jordan Bell was there with her 5-year-old daughter, Jennsen. She said she is trying to do one good deed with her daughter per day.
Danoff hopes to eventually work with the schools to get more kids involved in pick-ups.
Besides education, another important component to Stewards of Sedona is collecting data in order to stop some of the trash spread before it starts. The Stewards fill out a checklist of what kind of trash they found and where, to the best of their ability. The comprehensive list is divided into Fruits & Vegetables, Candy, Other Food, Glass, Cardboard, Metal, Plastics, Rubber, Styrofoam, Clothing, Hygiene Products, Fishing Supplies, Vehicle Parts, Roadside Work Materials, Smoking Items and Other.
“This step, what this is going to do is, in areas such as Shangri-La, where it’s not a popular picnic site, it’s going to allow us to tell the Forest Service like, ‘Dude, we found 1,200 diapers within 25 feet of the water on average,’” Danoff said. “We’ve collected all the historic trash away from there, and now we’re just seeing what’s coming back, over and over and over again.
“We can then reach out to local retailers and we can go after, like, ‘Hey we’re finding the same water shoe tag every single week in the same area.’ And maybe at Slide Rock or maybe at, you know, Dairy Queen, [they] could cut the tags off when [they] sell water shoes. That preemptively by itself could solve a small problem. Then we can report this to Arizona Game & Fish, we can report this to law enforcement officers with the Forest Service.”
After a few more months of gathering statistics, Danoff plans to relay the data on which creek sites are receiving continuous flows of trash and what kind to local nonprofit groups and the Forest Service. With that, Danoff hopes they will be able to lobby for increased “no littering” signs in hotspots, possibly in multiple languages.
“Our hope here is to build camaraderie with the Forest Service so that we all see it as a team,” Danoff said. “We’re all in this together, were all trying to help and we want to have the Forest Services’ back as much as we possibly can because we see these people pushing it hard and they’ve been going hard, and they just don’t have the resources.”
On the Tuesday after Fourth of July, USFS rangers Kelly Anderson and Trevor Johnson joined the pick-up party.
“They both went above the call of duty during our last event, to ensure hikers coming in and out of the trail were safely taken care of by filtering water for them and offering aid when needed several times,” Danoff said.
The Forest Service has also helped by picking up the dozens of filled trash bags at the end of the cleanups and transporting them to their private dumpsters. Eventually, Danoff hopes they can have a public trash can for this purpose at Chavez Campground.
Danoff has been pleasantly surprised with how quick people jumped up to volunteer with Stewards of Sedona and the large turnout for the pickups.
“We didn’t anticipate that we would have this sort of response from our community and it truly was amazing to see people respond to Sedona like that,” he said. “I felt like during the pandemic we were dealing with just a ton of disappointment … and everybody started to just kind of feel hopeless. And it was amazing because people reached out to us and were like, ‘Dude, we want to help. We will do whatever it takes.’”
