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

Coeur d’Alene’s ‘litterbug fairy’ cleans Tubbs Hill out of love, pride

By 7:45 a.m. Kim Ashbaugh has already picked up two bagfuls of broken glass, bottles and wrappers. Now, standing on one secluded beach on Tubbs Hill in Coeur d’Alene, she retrieves a used diaper from the base of a shrub.

“Everything turns into its own little garbage can,” she said.

By midmorning on any given day, Ashbaugh has likely hauled several bags of trash off Tubbs Hill and is heading back for another sweep.

The Coeur d’Alene resident has been regularly cleaning Tubbs Hill for the past 15 years, going out on trash-collecting missions three or four times a week. In the summer she starts between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. The project is a combination of love, pride and therapy, she said.

“It’s embarrassing to me personally that someone would come to my city and see all this trash on their first walk around Tubbs Hill,” she said.

“I can’t clean the world,” she added. “But I can clean Tubbs Hill.”

On Wednesday morning, Ashbaugh picked her way around the lakeside network of trails in Coeur d’Alene. She walked fast but kept a sharp eye out for beer bottles, wrappers and other discarded detritus.

She doesn’t miss much. Bottles thrown half-heartedly down a hill don’t go unnoticed. Nor do shards of broken glass scattered in the dirt.

Her acumen stems in part from her familiarity with Tubbs Hill, but it’s also a matter of long practice. Ashbaugh worked for a decade as a quality control tester for Honeywell Electronic Materials. During that period, she spent her days examining electronics for slight imperfections.

“It transfers,” she said of her time as a quality control tester. “It’s just a different way of looking.”

After an hour of walking, Ashbaugh has filled three bags of trash. It’s a relatively slow day, she said. Not, for instance, like the day after the Fourth of July, when she spent six hours cleaning Tubbs Hill, filling 10 or more large bags full of the celebration’s leftovers.

She usually works her way from the east side of the hill to the west, turning around at the parking lot near the Coeur d’Alene Resort and making her way up and over the hill. On Wednesday as she rounded a corner and the resort tower came into view, she ran into two other men carrying several large bags of garbage.

“Oh, look,” she called out. “We have a hero.”

The “heroes” are David Cohen and his son, Aaron. It’s still early in the morning, but Aaron was covered in sweat. He’d just scrambled down a semicliff to the lakeshore to retrieve trash from a favored party spot.

“I hate that place,” David Cohen said.

The two found a crack pipe the other day, they said. They regularly see hypodermic needles hidden in the bushes, along with the standard array of beer bottles, empty bags and cigarettes.

David Cohen has lived in Coeur d’Alene nearly 50 years. For 43 of those years, he jogged Tubbs Hill and “never stopped for anything.”

Four years ago, he met Kim.

“Kim was the one who got me motivated,” he said. “She’s my mentor. Because she’s relentless. She’s determined. She’s dogged.”

Ashbaugh sidestepped the praise, pointing out that, on this day, David Cohen had collected more trash than she did.

George Sayler, the president of the Tubbs Hill Foundation, echoed Cohen.

“She certainly has befriended the hill,” Sayler said in an email. “What she has been doing for many years is truly amazing and we all appreciate her efforts. We fondly refer to her as ‘Walkabout.’ ”

Ashbaugh grew up in Colville, and lived in Cheney until 1996. That’s when she met her husband, walking with stick-maker Norman Oss, better known as Stickman. She moved to Coeur d’Alene, into a house right across from the east entrance of Tubbs Hill.

She said cleaning the hill started simply enough.

“It just started because I love Tubbs Hill, and if I’m going to go hiking somewhere, I want it to be clean,” she said.

And, in its own way, the hill has reciprocated the love and devotion Ashbaugh’s showered upon it over a decade and a half. Ashbaugh suffers from depression, she said. Hiking and picking up trash has helped.

“Getting out and being active helps,” she said.

Cleaning up the daily mess humans leave behind can get exhausting. Sometimes, she said, she doesn’t want to continue. The disregard many show for their surroundings overwhelms her.

“A lot of them think, ‘Oh, someone else will clean that up,’ ” she said. “There is no litterbug fairy.”

The wider implications are frightening, she said. While cleaning in the morning, she thinks about the giant garbage patches floating in the ocean.

“You can throw something in here and it can end up in the Pacific,” she said, and sighed heavily, as if contemplating the trash she may have failed to pickup. “I’m sure it does.”

But overall, she remains remarkably sanguine about the never-ending stream of garbage.

“Yeah, it bothers me,” she said. “But once I leave, I know the next people coming will get (to see) it clean, and they won’t see what I see.”