If you haven't been down to the Truckee River Bike Path in a while, it's a sad scene, especially as you get close to downtown Reno. The Wells Underpass has become a sizeable camp out area for the homeless. Trash and debris doesn't just end up on the ground, but also in our beautiful Truckee River. It breaks your heart to see it. Volunteers pull out what they can. Group leader Grant Denton of the Karma Box Project told me volunteers and a county funded program called the River Stewards pull out "anywhere between 40 to 60 bags of trash a day."
Today (Wednesday) Grant led his Karma Box Project group knee deep into a cold, trash-filled Truckee for another cleanup, to help bring back what fishermen have always called "The Big Tricky," also known as the heartbeat of this community. As he put it, “There's not a single person who's been out here for any length of time who isn't connected to this river somehow."
Today’s group of 25 thought cleaning the one area by the underpass would take an hour. That was wishful thinking: "You got layers of trash. You start pulling one layer, you got another layer underneath it and one underneath that. Its a...there's a lot of trash in there."
We saw plenty of food containers, bike parts, containers and cups. Clothing, chairs, shopping carts and cardboard. Shoes, toys and even TV sets. Grant said "You got blankets, you have bedframes, you have tires, springs. Just random, random things." At the same time, he doesn't exactly blame the homeless: "You know, we have a magical bus that drives in front of our house that takes the trash. These guys don't."
Grant's Karma Box Project gets some help. The River Stewards, a county-funded program, finds homeless volunteers and gives them incentives to clean up trash along the river for 4 hours a day. The Karma Box Project's goal is collecting over 420 yards of trash from the camps to bring back the river. As Grant puts it, “It all starts with trash, because we all have that in common, you know?"
For now, it's the best that can be done here...until the day a permanent solution can be found.
Of course the Karma Box Project is always looking for volunteers. We have a link to their Facebook page, below:
