2007-02-17 – Calico Cleanup
To start the Calico trip, we headed up the 15, attempting to get to Calico Friday night. That went over like a fart in church! 3 Hours later we were in the Inland Empire still, so we called my (Mat’s) mom to see if we could spend the night. She conveniently lives in Fontana, so we were basically there already. 4 A.M. Saturday morning, we wake up, shower then hit the road. Around 6:45 we arrive to try and find everybody. Once we find the MJR group (they had been sleeping when we first drove around) we set up camp. It was now we realized we forgot our sleeping bags! Good job me… 
Thankfully Russ had an extra that we used in addition to the blankets I didn’t forget to bring!
After the driver’s meeting for the group leaders, we all headed to the staging area.
MJR was assigned to putting up some signs. Here are the tools we received:
Our group had 21 signs to post, while the other two did 6, and 11!!! We had to book it! The first couple took a while until we got the hang of it. Some ground was horrible to go through, and others cut through like butter. Along the way, we picked up any trash we saw.
In Kurt’s work truck we had a whole house. We were ready to move to Tijuana, Mexico! We had a couch, TV, VCR, BBQ grille, complete with washer and dryer! To boot, we also had steering components from a VW (or something small), a motorcycle frame, car stereo, and a screen door among other things!
When one of the groups finished, Russ came to join ours for the last couple signs.
We ran out of ’3′ stickers, so we had to improvise! What we did was cut an 8 in half, although during our night run we found out that it looks an awful lot like a 1 from farther at night!
We had spotted some other trash, so on our way back to the staging area we stopped to get 3 more washers and a water heater that had been dumped.
Eating Time!!!
We BBQd some sausage and veggies that Mike brought (Thanks Mike!!!). The sausage was REALLY good! I’m going to have to shop at Trader Joes for sausage in the future! Then we decided to head out on a night run and do Phillips Loop. It was right around camp, and somewhat short. It was perfect for what we wanted because I was kind of tired, and Tiffany didn’t really want to go on a night run at all. She ended up not being very happy through one stretch of the run as it was. The run was mostly pretty easy, except for one section where I felt I needed a spotter. I probably could have made it through without it, but I didn’t want to take a chance on breaking something trying to just muscle over it when with a spotter it was easy to just crawl as a Jeep should! Everybody else made it over no problem, but they’ve all got more experience (and rig) than I do! (Plus, they cheated… Mike got out before hand, Stuart has a beautifully beefy rig, and Russ got to see it when he hopped out to spot me!)
After the short run we went back to camp and did the mandatory campfire and roasted some marshmallows. We made a couple smores, and had some wine (Thanks Russ!).
UPDATE:
Joint Clean Up Totals:
(448) rigs, (741) energetic volunteers, (16) tons of trash, (5) vehicles recovered, (67) trail markers installed, (2) kiosks installed, and all of the graffiti in the canyons was removed. BLM Barstow Field Office extends their gratitude and thanks to all those that participated and contributed to this events success. Their staff led a church youth group and IE4WD played in the Calico’s this last weekend. Both groups swore that Calico hasn’t been that clean in many, many years.
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