HOW someone managed to leave a bra atop Mount Seymour the volunteers at Surfrider will never know, but it was one of the many discoveries made when the crew took to cleaning the mountain after this year's snow melt.
The "Snow Melts, Trash Doesn't" campaign by the local Surfrider Foundation chapter organized a group of about 25 volunteers to scour the hills of Seymour Mountain earlier this month, looking for everything the snowboarders and skiers left behind.
At the end of the day there were eight full garbage bags of trash, and another eight of recyclables, and while most of the garbage included things like food wrappers, lighters and plastic bottles, there were a few surprises this year, as chapter member Heather Hendry explains.
"We found a bra and birth control, so we were joking that one saucy girl might have left all that there. That was the most unusual I'd say," she said. "There's lots more whiskey and Fireball than you would think, because that's quite popular to keep you warm on the mountain."
This is the second year the organization has put together volunteer clean-ups on the mountains, an extension of what has long been done on the region's beaches.
Last year, crews scoured Cypress, Grouse and Seymour and uncovered, among other things, Trevor Linden's iPod. This year they will do Seymour and have plans for a much larger cleanup of Whistler-Blackcomb later in August.
Much of the garbage, said Hendry, was found in the ditches surrounding the parking lot, and likely found its way down there when the snow plows cleared the parking lots of snow and, with it, all the trash people left by their cars. The area under the lifts was also a hot spot for litter, especially recyclable bottles that were likely dropped from the lifts.
Hendry said collecting the trash is particularly important because much of it winds up in streams and creeks during the annual snowmelts, eventually winding up in the oceans and the food chain.
Surfrider is working with Seymour Mountain to add to the number of garbage cans and encourage recycling, but even if there's nothing nearby, Hendry said skiers always have the option of putting trash in their pockets.
But the message they really want to get across is for people not to bring the trash on the mountain in the first place, and to avoid using single-serve plastic bottles and foods with lots of packaging.
"Reduce, not recycle," said Hendry, playing off the old environmental mantra. "Seymour's been very, very open to our ideas about putting up more recycling areas and that sort of stuff, so we really like returning there to help them out."
Mount Seymour marketing manager Julie Mulligan said the ski hill works with the group all winter to raise awareness and have set up garbage cans at the top and bottom of lifts, but said it's a problem that's hanging around.
"I don't think it's a huge problem, I don't think it's any worse than anywhere else," she said.
