Eagle Bend Conservation Area Clean-Up, April 2026
In March, KCT discovered an abandoned camp site deep in the wetlands on the far side of the pond at KCT’s Eagle Bend Conservation Area. While we do allow respectful day use on our conserved lands, camping (short or long term) is not permitted. This site left a large area littered with garbage and abandoned personal items.
With the huge volume of trash, the distance, and the pond, we needed to get creative on how to get the heavy bags back to the truck and off the conservation area.
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What better than a Garbage Barge?
After towing our garbage barge and our industrial strength trash bags across the pond, we trudged through wetland to the camp site ruins. What we thought would be a quick cleanup turned into a scavenger hunt followed by a solid full body workout. Flooding in December 2025 had distributed garbage across about an acre of wetland and had woven it into the dense vegetation. Much of the trash was still saturated from the high flows, maximizing the weight of our trash bags.
Can you find all the trash in these photos?
Five garbage barge loads were removed from the property, for a total of 500 pounds of garbage! The feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment after a good trash cleanup is real. The massive amount of waste is sobering; a good reminder that our choices matter, and we all have the power to make a difference!
Our small staff works hard cleaning and restoring KCT’s conserved lands, ensuring these areas remain wild, and free of trash for the fish and wildlife that migrate, feed, breed, rear, and live there. We can all play a role in stewarding the beautiful wild places of Kittitas County.
To learn more about KCT’s Eagle Bend Conservation Area, please visit our Eagle Bend Property page. You can also read about more Eagle Bend cleanup efforts in an earlier blog post, Birding and Stewardship at Eagle Bend!
Protect the Lands You Love
We love this amazing area and we know you do too! From the alpine environment at Snoqualmie Pass to the shrub steppe habitat of the Yakima River Canyon, Kittitas County is home to an amazing diversity of habitat types. These special places are under increasing pressure from development. The population is projected to grow by 40% in our rural areas in the next 20 years. This growth makes it more important than ever to protect our lands before it is too late, and you can help.
Your support will ensure critical habitat in Kittitas County remains accessible and healthy for wildlife, fish, and people. Just $25 or more for the year will preserve important habitat and restore streams and rivers that have been degraded by human impacts.
