Volunteers step up as trash piles in the Enchantments

LEAVENWORTH — Leavenworth resident Tarina Ferrel remembers her 2022 hike up to Colchuck Lake as a powerful solitary experience.

“That was after a pretty hard time in my life, and I just felt like hiking that solo just brought so much empowerment,” said Ferrel.

On her way down, however, she was met with a much different reality. By then, the trail was packed with people heading up. As she pulled over for each group, Ferrel was not only struck by the volume of hikers, but by what she saw as a lack of preparation and trail etiquette.

“After that, I said never again,” said Ferrel.

Ferrel’s experience is not unique. Over the years, the Enchantments has struggled with the impacts of high visitor volumes. According to previous Echo reporting, the Enchantments only makes up 6.7 percent of the Alpine Lakes Wilderness area, but it receives the highest amount of traffic in the entire district. In 2024, it saw over 120,000 visitors alone.

Managing the area, which falls under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service, has been further complicated by agencywide staffing and funding cuts. Though the Forest Service secured five seasonal Wilderness rangers this summer, according to agency spokesperson Deb Kelly, hikers are continuing to report persistent trash and human waste problems.

Hearing these accounts, Ferrel decided to see it for herself. She returned to Colchuck Lake with latex gloves, trash bags and her friend Shane Thayer, a city council member for the City of Leavenworth.

“We picked up trash on our way up to the lake…On our way down, not even 20 minutes later, there were water bottles and trash on the trail,” said Thayer. “It was pretty disgusting too, seeing used tampons and a lot of toilet paper.”

Ferrel and Thayer walked out with three bags of garbage that day. When Ferrel returned a few weeks later, she picked up another three bags. Some items were strewn about in plain sight, while others were hidden off the side of the trail and in the crevices of rocks and logs. She found plastic and glass bottles, used toilet paper, used period supplies and jeans covered in feces.

“I think I had a total of 30 latex gloves on me, and I used quite a bit, as you can imagine,” said Ferrel.

Ferrel and other volunteers have been documenting their findings on social media to help raise awareness. These types of videos prompted Leavenworth resident Delaney Adrian to take action.

“Some of the things they found were wild. So, I figured it was my turn to help,” said Adrian.

Adrian and her husband headed up to the parking lot on Sept. 6 with a handful of trash bags and gloves, planning to cover as much of the trailhead as they could within a few hours.

“We opened the [car] door and found trash on the ground. So we spent the majority of our time hiking along the road and in the parking lot,” said Adrian. “We filled two bags of trash quite quickly.”

As they picked up cigarettes, shoes, banana peels and more, they were also picking up no parking signs that had been removed and dropped down the embankment.

“I walked away feeling frustrated and that we barely made a dent,” said Adrian.

Adrian said a few people thanked them, but the majority were uninterested that any cleanup was taking place. However, one group of backpackers asked for a bag so they could collect trash on their trip.

“More people should do that…Bring an extra bag and help pull out some trash,” said TREAD Executive Director Mat Lyons. “And it sucks that that has to happen, but what a great way to give back to the place you're traveling to.”

Lyons said he is unaware of any dedicated volunteer program or coordinator organizing cleanup efforts in the Enchantments this year, leaving residents such as Ferrel and Adrian to take on the work independently.

“With the Enchantments Alliance initiative, we are going to change that,” said Lyons.

The Enchantments Alliance is a brand new initiative led by TREAD and designed to build long-term capacity and resources to support future management efforts in the Enchantments.

On Oct. 22, the initiative will debut at Icicle Creek Center for the Arts with a presentation and preview of a documentary film about the state of the Enchantments by North Forty Productions.

After the release of the documentary, Lyons said the next step is to raise enough money to hire a part-time volunteer coordinator to help people like Adrian and Ferrel access resources and coordinate coverage.

Lyons sees a number of ways the Enchantments Alliance could support the Forest Service beyond providing volunteers, such as raising money for signage, educating the public, or purchasing and maintaining a dumpster. In the long-term, however, the initiative plans to support any major management decisions the Forest Service makes to mitigate the area’s overuse.

“We don't know what that looks like yet, so we're going to build our capacity, our funding, our volunteers, and our partners to be ready when the Forest Service is ready,” said Lyons.

TREAD’s vision for the initiative is for it to eventually have its own steering committee and 501(c)3 status.

“It's not TREAD’s goal to run this thing forever,” said Lyons.

More information can be found at theenchantmentsalliance.org.

Taylor Caldwell: 509-433-7276 or taylor@ward.media