On Sunday April 6, Michelle and I planned to hike to the Hollywood sign. In order to get to the trail without producing extra air pollution, we decided not to drive there. We planned to take the Metro to the Hollywood/Vine station, take the DASH bus about halfway up Beachwood Dr., walk the rest of the way up to the start of the trail, and then start our hike. However, after getting off the Metro at our designated stop, we found out the DASH doesn't run on Sundays. Not at all discouraged, we walked about 2 miles, mostly uphill, to the start of the Hollywood sign hiking trail. When we got there, we saw some patrol officers who told us the trail was closed. 

Since we were planning to pick up trash, we decided to just pick up trash as we walked back down Beachwood Dr. We used a paper grocery bag to carry the trash that we picked up because we know that it takes a lot less time for paper to break down in the environment than for plastic to break down. We also brought gardening gloves and reusable water bottles so that we produced as little waste as possible on this trip. I noticed half of the items we picked up were cigarette butts. This is so disgusting and disheartening because it shows that many people smoke, which is detrimental to everyone's health, and that these people are too inconvenienced to dispose of their cigarette butts properly. We also noticed that we found more trash and cigarette butts the closer we got to the more city-like area as opposed to the area with all the fancy houses closer to the start of the hiking trail. 

The trash we picked up as we walked down Beachwood Dr. in Los Angeles.

Along the way, we saw many pedestrians and a couple of them even stopped to ask us about what we were doing. They were pleased by our actions and thanked us for cleaning up their neighborhood. I think this proves that at least some people really are concerned about all the trash that is lying around in public areas. It's quite sad as well to think that seeing all this trash in public is normal and more people aren't bothered enough to pick up trash or fight to get something done about it. Still, it's nice to know that some people do care about the conditions of our environment. As a last note, please check out www.litteringiswrongtoo.org for some laughs and to see what kind of things are just as inappropriate as littering!