Forest Service Facing Mountains of Trash : Parks: Officials say water quality and scenic beauty are threatened by excessive garbage and waste created by visitors to San Gabriel Canyon.

Last year, Donna Thompson found a dinette set during the annual Operation Supersweep in San Gabriel Canyon. The year before that, Marie Lopez stumbled upon a bag of hypodermic needles.

This year the pickup yielded more routine refuse: three tons of bottle caps, food wrappers, beer cartons and used diapers, all artifacts of the canyon’s 3 million annual visitors.

With burgeoning urban areas pushing up against the mountains of the Angeles National Forest, as many as 30,000 people visit San Gabriel Canyon each day on summer weekends, bringing with them some of the urban ills they seek to escape.

The scars of recreational use are evident along the stream bed. A paper plate, still smeared with food, floats in the water. Graffiti disfigures the rugged canyon wall. A box full of plastic soda bottles and picnic debris sits nearby, along with several soiled diapers. Squirrels scamper in an overflowing trash bin. The bathroom of a nearby picnic area is swamped with used toilet paper and puddles of urine.

According to the Los Angeles County Health Department, human waste and other pollution in the stream could spread disease among swimmers.

“This is outrageous in terms of the threat you have for public health,” said Dennis Rose, a cabin owner in the canyon who has made a personal quest of wiping out graffiti and clearing trash. “This terrifies families, so you have a lot of people that come up here, they see this and they don’t come back.”

The San Gabriel Canyon plunges south toward Azusa out of the San Gabriel Mountains, branching off into east and west forks near the bottom. Altogether, about 35 miles of stream are accessible to visitors on foot or in cars.

It’s the most popular of several canyons in the U.S. Forest Service’s Mt. Baldy District near Azusa, but Tom Spencer, recreation director for the district, said the problems there are typical of the district as a whole.

“When people go to a place that’s trashed, people think, ‘That’s the way it’s supposed to be and someone’s going to come in and clean up after me,’ ” said Spencer. “We call it a stadium mentality.”

But the district doesn’t have the resources to go picking up after humanity. The budget that includes maintenance along undeveloped areas of the streams and roadsides is $76,100 this year, down 20% from last year. Last year, three Forest Service employees covered those areas; now there’s only one.

Spencer said, however, that additional funds from parking fees may allow the Forest Service to hire another staffer and provide more toilet and trash facilities.

There are nine permanent toilet facilities in the canyon and six pairs of portables. That’s more than there used to be, but the area really needs three to four times that number of portables, Spencer said.

“Prior to 1992 we didn’t have portable toilets,” he said. “There was a lot more human waste scattered around the canyon bottom.”

In an effort to improve conditions, Rose, the cabin owner, has alerted county health officials to the potential environmental dangers.

A letter he wrote last August to Jack Petralia, director of environmental protection for the county’s Department of Health Services, prompted the department to investigate the health risks of litter next to the stream.

Petralia, in turn, wrote to Forest Supervisor Michael Rogers in September, saying that trash, soiled baby diapers and human feces were found in the stream beds.

“Water from the San Gabriel River is collected and treated by the Covina Irrigation District and wholesaled to numerous public water supply systems in the San Gabriel Valley,” Petralia wrote.

Water quality data from the Los Angeles County Public Works Department was inadequate to determine the health risk, he said, but “conditions observed along the stream beds indicate that water contamination from human excrement is likely.”

Any contaminants would be filtered out at the water treatment facility, Petralia said, and would not threaten drinking water supplies.

But they could be a problem for swimmers who get a mouthful, he cautioned.

Aside from warning swimmers not to drink the water, there’s little his agency can do.

“One of the problems is that this isn’t like Puddingstone or Santa Fe Dam, where they’re easily closed,” he said. “This is open, so how do you keep people out without sending an army of cops in there?”

You don’t, Spencer said.

“National forests are open,” he said. “They’re designed to be used by the general public. Individuals take on a lot of responsibility.”

To some extent, visitors do accept the responsibility. The Forest Service scatters 30 large roll-away trash bins throughout the area, and people use them. But the trash overfills the bins, which are emptied once a week--not often enough to keep up with the stacks of garbage.

Researchers noticed during a 1989 study that canyon users tried to stack garbage as neatly as possible next to full trash bins or trash cans, Spencer said. But animals--raccoons, foxes, squirrels and bears--would scavenge for snacks at night, scattering the refuse up to 50 feet away.

And the Forest Service can’t schedule more frequent pickups right now.

“Right now we’re limping along on one worn-out garbage truck,” Spencer said, adding that a new one should be on hand by the end of the summer.

To fill the gap between the resources available and the resources needed to maintain the canyon, the Forest Service relies on volunteers as well as court referrals--primarily those convicted of misdemeanors and sentenced to community service. Members of numerous private and public groups also chip in on weekends, helping with maintenance and education.

One of the most extensive efforts involves Ecoteams, a collaboration among the Forest Service, the Los Angeles Conservation Corps and the California Environmental Project.

The teams provide bilingual safety and environmental information to forest users, as well as jobs to young men and women from inner-city areas of Los Angeles. Workers hike the forest in pairs, explaining to visitors why garbage must be packed out, and how to avoid trampling stream vegetation. They also warn about forest hazards such as poison oak or diving into a shallow pool of water.

Thirty-seven Ecoteam members work in the Angeles National Forest each weekend. They are paid $35 to $80 a day.

The California Environmental Project also coordinates scheduled cleanups by 20 to 60 volunteers. The groups remove litter in San Gabriel Canyon about twice a month, but once again, garbage pickup is a stumbling block.

“We have so many volunteers cleaning up trash that the Forest Service can’t keep up with the bags,” said Scott Mathes, executive director of the organization. “Sometimes the bags sit there for two or three days, and by then sometimes the animals get to it and scatter it into the streams.”

Another partnership is the annual Operation Supersweep, co-sponsored since 1980 by the county Agriculture Department, the Hughes Ecology Club, the Boy Scouts of America and the Forest Service.

Arriving in the early morning, hundreds of volunteers ranging from grade-school children to grandparents are shuttled to sites in the canyon, where they turn the task of trash collecting into a family outing.

This year, the scouring efforts of 383 volunteers left the canyon in as close to pristine condition as possible, although they knew it wouldn’t last long.

“You’d be surprised. In a few weeks, it builds back up again,” said Marie Lopez, one of the event’s coordinators. “The next big dump is going to be the Fourth of July weekend.”

In fact, less than two weeks after the June 4 volunteer cleanup, the stream bed already was littered anew with cans, disposable diapers and other trash.

The canyon’s last line of defense is Dennis Rose, who has single-handedly vowed to keep the canyon’s main road, California 39, graffiti-free. Spencer calls Rose “a one-man graffiti-cleaning machine.”

Now, Spencer said, Rose is registered as a volunteer with the Forest Service, which pays for the paint he uses to cover graffiti along the highway. Rose estimates that previously he spent $1,400 of his own money on the chore.

Driving along the winding road, Rose pointed out the square gray patches that mark his efforts. But he pulled over and sighed in frustration over a new batch of blue and black insignias scrawled on rocks along the canyon wall. That would take a team of workers with steam-cleaning equipment to remove.

“To me, it’s an area that’s in need of just some tender loving care,” he said.

Rose is eager to take on such a project, but he said his hands are tied by Forest Service regulations limiting the involvement of volunteers.

Spencer said the Forest Service is legally responsible for volunteers and cannot recruit more people than it has the staff to oversee. Ironically, the same staff cuts that hinder the Forest Service’s ability to provide basic services also keeps it from using volunteers to pick up the slack.

To Rose, who grew up in the area, witnessing the forest’s degradation is like watching the slow decline of an old friend.

“I used to ride up here on a bicycle when I was a kid,” he said. “The canyon used to be much more pristine. The Forest Service (officials) haven’t redeployed their resources to adjust to the number of people using this canyon.”

Spencer said the problem is that funding for national forests is set up on a uniform scale, regardless of the rate of recreational use.

Compared to national forests in rural areas, “urban national forests are much more highly impacted by use, because we’re dealing with urban problems and urban issues,” he said.

The Angeles National Forest currently represents 70% of the open space in Los Angeles County, Spencer said. By 2015, it will probably represent 90% of the county’s undeveloped land. As open space throughout the county shrinks, the forest will become more precious--and more threatened.

“I think there is a big psychological reassurance there to say I can see the mountains and there aren’t houses all over them,” he said, “to be able to wake up after a storm and see the snowcap.”