Mr. Clean of the Canyons

For the last two years, Scott Mathes has hiked the mountain canyons of Southern California, seeking places other outdoors lovers try to avoid: the wild sites where the beauty of nature has been destroyed by people illegally dumping old appliances, furniture and other junk.

Then the trash man of the canyons goes to work.

Mathes of Van Nuys cleans up the mess left by others, carrying out a personal mission to reclaim undeveloped areas that have become informal and illegal trash dumps.

This week, Mathes and crews from the Los Angeles Conservation Corps began their latest rescue: dredging tons of trash from a canyon in the Santa Susana Pass above Chatsworth.

“This is the granddaddy of illegal dump sites,” said Mathes, 29, executive director and co-founder of the California Environmental Project, a small nonprofit group that removes trash from wilderness areas.

The steep dirt walls of the canyon are nearly invisible in some places, covered by decades of discards. Car bodies and old appliances rust in the brush. Barrels of oil lie overturned, their contents seeping into the stream bed. Broken bottles and smashed beer cans are scattered among the rocks.

Besides being unsightly, the trash is unhealthy for wildlife. Mathes said jagged metal and broken glass can cause cuts and leaking oil can contaminate scarce water that animals in the mountains depend on.

For decades, environmental groups have sought to clean the canyon, but with little success. The task was too overwhelming. The deep canyon stretches several miles between Rocky Peak Road and Topanga Canyon Boulevard, and much of its length is piled with layer upon layer of junk.

“It’s a pretty massive undertaking,” said Mathes as he watched workers hoist the carcasses of old refrigerators and water heaters up the hillside.

He estimated it may take four to five months to clear all trash from the canyon, and it will be even longer before vegetation destroyed by the avalanche of refuse revives sufficiently to attract wildlife.

Cleanup of the pass is the latest project by Mathes and his organization, which survives on donations and support from other environmental groups. Since the California Environmental Project was launched to carry out an informal cleanup of Malibu Canyon in March, 1989, the group has coordinated dozens of cleanups around Southern California. “In the last year I’ve seen areas I thought would never get clean and are clean now,” he said.

“Little by little, we’re making a real impact,” said Martha Diepenbrock, executive director of the Los Angeles Conservation Corps.

For Mathes, cleaning up other people’s junk is a personal mission that began when he was a teen-ager in Missouri. On canoe trips down local rivers, he would pick up the bottles and cans he found in shallow waters. “Our canoes would be full of garbage by the end of the trip,” he said.

Mathes dropped out of high school in 1979 and came to California from Missouri to hike the John Muir Trail between Yosemite and Mt. Whitney. He said that trip and others revealed to him how many secluded areas were being scarred by illegal dumping.

He and a friend, Mary Jane Parks, organized informal cleanup crews to pull trash from problem areas. The effort snowballed and he and Parks incorporated the California Environmental Project last June.

Since then, he has been working as a consultant for the Conservation Corps, pointing out areas in need of cleaning and supervising work crews. Corps workers and volunteers provide the labor.

It is not a job Mathes enjoys, but something he sees as necessary.

“I wish we didn’t have to do this,” he said. “But I feel like this is my purpose now.”