The San Gabriel Mountains are often referred to as the “backyard of Los Angeles” because of their popularity among city-dwellers looking for a place to hike, swim, and enjoy the great outdoors. Unfortunately, all those visitors take a toll on the local ecosystem, and mountains of trash have piled up along some of the mountains’ most popular locations.
Enter the Canyon City Environmental Project, a volunteer group that has been doing clean-ups in the area for more than half a decade. Nathan Nuñez founded it as a freshman in college, and says years later, dozens of diverse volunteers still show up to help him fill bins with waste that would otherwise clog up the crystal-clear San Gabriel River.
“I feel it's the simplest way to get back to land, to go pick up trash from other people,” he says. “No [matter] which political side you're on, what your religious values … we're going up there to protect the land, to pick up the trash, but also to bring awareness to these long-standing issues in the San Gabriel Mountains.”
The “bringing awareness” part of the group’s mission has become particularly important in recent years, as viral social media posts have drawn even larger crowds to the mountains during peak seasons.
Nuñez says part of the problem is that LA doesn’t have enough neighborhood green spaces for its residents to enjoy. That, combined with the issue of the U.S. Forest Service being underfunded, makes it hard to control the crowds and their resulting waste.
“The bottom line is there's just too many people in the East Fork [of the San Gabriel River], so there has to be a management plan that does control the number of people,” says Nuñez.
Because of these issues, Fodor recently added the entire San Gabriel Mountains National Monument to its annual “No List,” which warns visitors to stay away from areas that have been too heavily impacted by tourism. And all of this comes at a time when lawmakers are pushing to further expand the monument’s boundaries.
Nuñez says if that expansion is going to happen, it should come with real funding and support for forest management too — because as much as they try, his volunteers can’t do it all.
“We need to support the Forest Service, so they can have a carrying capacity, so they can better manage these areas. We can put 100 volunteers up there … and it's not sustainable,” he says. “But I see a future where we don't have to do these clean-ups as often because there's a bigger issue that needs to be addressed here.”
In the meantime, if you’d like to volunteer for a cleanup, you can follow Canyon City Environmental Project on Instagram.