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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Volunteers De-Trash North Idaho’s Roads Adopt-A-Highway Groups Clean Up After Polluting Motorists

Pop bottles, compact discs, fast-food wrappers and cigarettes.

It’s the kind of stuff people toss out of their cars, littering the side of the highway.

But on Saturday, hordes of volunteers spent the morning scouring North Idaho’s highways and byways for this trash.

Armed with jumbo plastic bags and sporting bright orange vests, 65 groups from the Adopt-A-Highway program got down and dirty.

“I used to litter but I don’t do it anymore,” said Chance Bailey, 16, as he combed a section of U.S. Highway 95. “People who do litter, if they would come out and clean up, I don’t think they’d litter any more.”

Bailey and several other youths and counselors from the Anchor House were joined by groups from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management and Seltice Elementary School.

Businesses and service groups donate time to clean up a stretch of road through the Adopt-a-Highway program.

Many of them were out Saturday for the kickoff of Idaho’s Too Great to Litter spring cleanup week.

Despite the morning sun, it wasn’t easy work.

These temporary trash collectors diligently searched both sides of the highway and the median, walking up to several miles.

Some of the pickings were yucky: condoms and rotting food.

“The hardest part is bending over several hundred times,” said Shelley Ruff, a second-grade teacher at Seltice Elementary School.

She and about 20 teachers and staff from the school pored over the section of I-90 near the McGuire Road overpass.

“It’s a good role model for our kids,” Bill Ramich, principal of Seltice Elementary School, said as cars and trucks whizzed by.

“I think they need to see that we put our backs where our mouths are.”

Besides, “It’s great exercise for us, which we wouldn’t do if we hadn’t promised to,” he said, sweat beading on his brow.

But it wasn’t all trash.

Ramich pocketed a black-handled crescent wrench he spied in the grass.

Last year, Seltice teachers found $23, not to mention a variety of undergarments.

“It looked like someone had been disrobing down the highway,” Ruff said with a laugh.

Lew Brown, a BLM ecologist, decided to chuck the Metallica CD he found.

He isn’t a big fan of the heavy metal group.

The five northern counties have the highest percentage of adopted highways in the state, said Wally Turk, spokesman for the Idaho Transportation Department.

About 600 miles of state and federal highways criss-cross the five northern counties.

More than 400 miles of roadway have been adopted by 208 groups, he said.

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