Though the People’s Republic of China didn’t go all out to celebrate Earth Day, our local hiking group, Beijing Hikers, was a bit more proactive, and put together its first annual Earth Day Clean Up Hike. We joined twenty-odd expats and packed onto a bus for a three hour ride to the small Cuàn Dǐ Xià village near a section of the Great Wall in the Mengtougou district of Beijing. We set off up the steep canyons with plastic bags in hand, picking up all manner of bottles, caps, wrappers and rubbish. From the village we hiked up to the Huáng Căo Liáng, or Yellow Grass Plateau, where we enjoyed a breezy lunch (we’d packed peanut butter sandwiches, bananas, peanuts and the obligatory chocolate bar, for the Stepho, of course). After lunch we got down and dirty and fanned out across a section of the plateau, picking garbage out of the tall grass and bushes.
The hike was beautiful, if a little hazy, and it felt good to do a little community service. It reminded me of the Earth Day clean up trips I used to do with my fellow scouts in Chappaqua’s Troop 2. We’d get giant, heavy-duty, bright orange garbage bags from the town and head into Whippoorwill Park where years of illegal dumping have left refrigerators, sinks and almost an entire car. Over a decade later I still have a bunch of old, intact glass bottles I found on those trips on a bookshelf at home.
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- The valley floor
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- Wild apricots!
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- Following the packcrank
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- Steph and the Elephant’s Trunk
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- Stalking cranks with camera
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- We collected quite the pile
