North Vancouver - Dear Editor: Today (Dec. 27) I took my friend Dianne along the Powerline trail, starting from the gravel lot at Grouse Mountain. As we approached the first pedestrian bridge over the drainage creek, we saw people looking down into the creek.When we got there, we saw what they were looking at. There must have been 400 empty plastic water and juice bottles (if not more than 400) in the creek along with lots of plastic bags. We looked up the mountain, the north face of the creek, and there were no bottles or plastic on that side at all.It was quite apparent the plastic bottles were dumped in that spot deliberately, dumped out one large bag at a time. The bottles had been placed strategically in seven different places in the creek bed. The water was obviously cold, but fortunately for the Grouse staff (Jim) and us locals helping, the amount of water was manageable to be able to get down and clean up the bottles. My friend and I helped by walking out two bags of bottles. There were still another three to four bags to be walked back out. Had the mountain received the normal/average amount of precipitation we would normally receive this time of year, it would have been much worse. They would not have been able to get in to clean up the bottles and plastic and these would have wound up littering the creek all the way down. Nasty.Sounds like the bottle recycle bin at Grouse was accidentally left unlocked and (likely) some teenagers must have been pretty bored last night. They would have had to walk (or cycle) the 400 bottles in from the Grouse parking lot, nearly a kilometre to the creek bed to dump the bottles in.Thanks to Jim and the others who got in the cold water to pick up all the bottles.Wendy PentlandNorth Vancouver
