By Shannon Moneo
Coffee and drink cups, beer boxes and cans, cigarette packs, chip bags, fast food wrappers and Styrofoam — all of these, and more trachy items, are fouling the Sooke area.

Does litter lying on roadsides mean that people who indiscriminately chuck out their garbage smoke, drink lots of coffee and beer, wolf down a lot of fast food from McDonalds's, A&W, Subway, Burger King, Tim Horton's and love junk food?

Several areas are showing public disregard, including the Blueberry Flats stretch on Highway 14 where a steady stream of garbage sullies the greenery.....

	photo courtesy of Dave Podmoroff This is some of the debris the Island Rock Crawlers and other four-by-four drivers picked up May 3 when they spent most of the day in the Butler/Boneyard Main area.

The Victoria-based Island Rock Crawlers Four Wheel Drive Society used their trucks for picking up trash, not distributing it. On May 3 from 9:30 a.m. until late afternoon approximately 30 people hit the Butler Main and Boneyard areas to tackle the refuse. Campsites and gravel pits in the area were targeted as well as the head of the roads where the dumpers have brazenly left their disgusting messes.

Rock Crawlers events coordinator Ian Redden, said the Harbour View area, a favourite four-by-four spot, is usually the beneficiary of Rock Crawlers' clean-up crews. In fact, the first-ever clean-up run was held there in 1996.

(Webmaster's note: Though Harbourview used to be open to vehicles and was the site of many IRC clean-ups, the area was closed in 2001 by The Land Conservancy, and is no longer available for use. Since then, the Butler/Boneyard Main area has been the focus of our clean-up efforts.)

Last year the trucks and drivers hauled out two industrial-sized bins of all sorts of detritus.

This year, two bins were quickly filled, one with scrap metal and one with garbage. A freezer, hot water tank, hide-a-bed, auto parts, sofas, matresses, TVs computer monitor, tool box, animal carcasses, clothing, home renovation materials, household refuse and even a travel trailer were collected.

Redden, a fisheries biologist who took up four-by-fouring (he drives a Suzuki Samurai) so that he could get into the quiet back-country, said reports they received indicated this year the Butler/Boneyard area was in high need of tidying up.

When the Rock Crawlers take to the South Island's hills they almost always haul out other people's trash. Three weeks ago after a trip to Tugwell Lake, Redden siad they brought back bags of broken glass.
"There is a problem out there," Redden affirmed.
.... (remainder of this article was not available for transcription)