I hike a lot in the foothills above Santa Barbara, CA, and my most common find is dog poop, bagged and unbagged. Next comes plastic water bottles and snack wraps. I also pick up cigarette butts. My most unusual find while foraging way off the trail was one of those huge green water tanks half buried in sediment and oak duff in a steep gully. It was about 10 feet across and 8 feet tall.
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As a regular trail tidier, I find myself cringing whenever I see another big corporation selling bottled water (the highest marked-up item ever) as a ‘healthier and natural source’ of such a basic commodity.
Source of pollution and corporate profits, for sure.
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Where it should be.
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You’ve discovered Toilet-henge! Congrats!
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Probably the strangest thing I’ve found is some kind of religious figurine, perhaps of Jesus or of the Virgin Mary? It was submerged in a stream in an area to the side which is covered in foliage. Not sure how it got there, no one seems to go into that part the park. That day was the only time I actually saw the figurine, it seems to have disappeared since. It may have been carried away by the stream, possibly explaining how it got their in the first place.
Too bad I didn’t get a photo, sometimes I doubt I even saw it.
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Worst find, and I did not clean it up - a trail of 10 or so paper plates leading from the edge of a field down into the forest, spaced 4-5 feet apart. Each plate contained a large pile of human feces and a single soiled blue nitrile glove.
I have no idea, and I don’t think I want to know either. We have a pretty high population of unhoused people with severe, untreated mental illnesses, so it was almost certainly one of them.
Best find: an abandoned kitty, who came home with me and was an excellent companion for many years.
Strangest find: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/10170221
A child’s stick-pony toy, which a woodrat had claimed for a nest adornment. Pretty far from the road, and it’s a remote road to begin with, so I have no idea why or how it was out there! The woodrat was clearly a collector of oddities though, it had decorated its nest with tin cans, old bones, and pine cone “cores” left by squirrels as well.
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I can’t find the photo, but I once found a 3’ tall minion balloon, which I brought home and left in the backyard because I wasn’t sure what to do with it. A few hours later my wife shrieked in horror, and there it was banging against the sliding glass door. Also, this message to the tooth fairy, delivered via balloon…
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My favourite wet weather hiking jacket I found on the side of the road!
My eldest son gets car sick, so I often pull over at random places to let his stomach settle. Often we pick up any rubbish we find while waiting. This particular time on the side of a busy toad I saw a crumpled red and black jacket in the weeds. Other than a mark on the hood it looked brand new, was unnamed, and was my size! I took it home and looked up the brand and type - it was still being sold and was NZ$800 on the rack! I feel for the person who lost it.
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Also, on a very remote beach I found the remains of a fire containing old letters, toys, diaries and photo albums. They looked to be from around the Second World War. I picked through them and tried to find anything that could identify the people involved, but unfortunately they were mostly too damaged. I took photos at the time but later deleted them. It was very strange, and made me feel very uneasy. I guess someone was trying to destroy painful memories in a remote ceremony by erasing the history of someone, but it left a big mess.
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The way the creature is lit gave me an idea, something truly monstrous. I spent an hour making this so you better enjoy it!
I call it:
Enjoy!
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It’s a thing of beauty. Good work. 
This guy will have his own Pixar movie in no time.
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Standing clap. Well done.
Now, do we have any genus guesses?
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I don’t know if this has been happening anywhere else, but a strange new ‘mini trend’ that I’ve been seeing on the most popular trail sections has been rock paintings. Not the usual graffiti, I mean little to medium-sized stones painted in colorful acrylics and usually with some kind of pro-environmental message, most likely by young kids, judging by the craftsmanship.
I have a mixed reaction to these. Great that the kids are connecting and expressing pro nature thoughts, but the method…
I’ve seen this stuff happening too in parks around town and I suspect that there are motivational, and possibly organizing efforts at a parental level involved. On the trails, I have no qualms about cleaning up what I can, but the park stuff… is it something that needs to be addressed before it grows into a real problem?
What I’ve also seen, (quite a few times now, on the trail) are little ‘fairy shrines’, usually at a tree hollow. The ones crafted using natural, site materials (twigs, moss, leaves, pebbles)? I’m willing to let those by, but I’ve also seen some using dollar store craft supplies with lots of gaudy plastic and metal bits, or garden ornament materials. Those I dismantle.
Anyone else seeing these?
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It’s a popular hobby, people leave painted rocks and others find and relocate them, there’re facebook groups dedicated to that.
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That explains why I’m clueless on this trend. Aside from the aesthetics, is it a valid concern from an environmental view?
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I genuinely thought this thing died out even before covid, but I can’t say how much acrylics are of a hazard, they’re often used for outside works, but I read now they can be toxic, though probably nothing compared with a single battery.
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I try to ignore the painted rocks - but I enjoyed this Easter Bunny.
Especially since next time we walked that way he had tactfully gone home again!
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Stacking and displacing bigger rocks disturbs the microhabitat of creatures living under them. It causes all the moisture previously stored under them to dry out, which results with destrtuction of that microhabitat.
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That’s more what I was wondering about. To be honest, yeah–the aesthetics, which is substantially subjective, I realize, also irritates me. That is, I come to a trail to be in a different world and hopefully not to bring in, or at least not leave any part of the world I normally live in at other times.
Handling a public trail’s public usage can be a very socially complicated communications challenge for trail management. For the easiest to access sections, many --if not most-- visitors are not regular hikers. It’s asking a lot of these casual visitors to develop an instant understanding of the fragility and necessary respect that needs to be observed to help preserve things.
I have no specific idea what roles social media plays in this effort, but it would be great to see it being mobilized in the right directions. I applaud those making efforts in this, and I sense that iNat plays, and probably will continue to play a greater role too.
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Could be a light-activated noise maker too. The LED might be connected for detecting light and the holes might be for a speaker on the other side. It looks very homemade, so maybe the battery ran out before it was ever activated?
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