Good Stewards of the Forest

Hello Everyone,

At the end of each archery season, I receive several phone calls about the mess that archers have left behind. From messy camp sites to someone leaving a gut pile in the middle of the road. I do not believe that all of the messes are created by archers, but archers are usually getting the blame for it.

None of us likes to clean up after others, but we need to start doing so. It could be as easy as picking up micro trash or carrying out trash that someone else left behind from a lunch break. I am surprised how many cans and bottles appear along the sides of the roads in the course of one night. There are those cases that are so big that you should bring in the authorities and let them deal with the issue. 

I am not talking about the large messes for you to take care of but the small ones. When you are getting ready to leave to go back home, take a walk around your campsite and look to see if you or anyone has dropped any trash; this would include micro trash, the corner of a candy bar wrapper or a small piece of plastic from your new batteries’ container, and make sure there is not a bag of trash still hanging from a tree.

If you are one of the archers who like to pack back into a remote area where there are fewer people, I hope when you arrived at your area, it was clean and looked like no one had been there before you, and that is how you should leave it for the next group of hunters and campers to find it when they arrive in the same area.

We all have a darn good idea of what the outdoors should look like (forest, high desert, grasslands, water frontage, and wilderness). So, let’s do our part to keep the outdoors looking like we have never even been there. 

Then, the next group of people who come after us can enjoy the outdoors as much as we did.

Thank you, John Wainwright