IDAHO FALLS -- University students and other volunteers will work Saturday (9/26/09) at the St. Anthony Sand Dunes to help clean up the area as part of National Public Lands Day.
Students from Brigham Young University-Idaho's 5th LDS Stake in Rexburg will gather at the Snow Building at 8 a.m. and travel to the cinder parking lot off the Red Road near the Sand Hills Resort east of the main dunes complex.
Other organizations and volunteers are encouraged to join the students and staff in the effort.
The cleanup project starts at 9 a.m. and will end about noon.
Volunteers will cleanup litter throughout the dunes and sift nails and other debris typically left from campfires along the Red Road. The Bureau of Land Management, the agency that manages the dunes, will cap off the day with lunch and T-shirts for volunteers.
"We rely on all our volunteers to help us keep our public lands a nice place to play," says Bill Boggs, an outdoor recreation planner with the BLM Upper Snake Field Office.
"It would be too big a job for BLM without outside help."
The 5th LDS Stake of BYU-Idaho has been a partner in cleaning the dunes for more than 15 years, Boggs says. And since 1999, the students have participated in the Public Lands Day cleanup.
Boggs says he met with stake leaders earlier this week at the dunes to help coordinate the cleanup, and as they were leaving, student groups began arriving "in droves." Most of the student use comes in the fall and spring, he says. The student groups account for about 10,000 of the people who use the dunes each year.
Boggs says he is still calculated numbers for the 2008-2009 fiscal year of use at the dunes, but preliminarily, it appears use will be about the same as last year or up a bit. During the last fiscal year 2007-2008, use was 211,000, a drop from the peak use year of 2006-2007 when 240,000 people visited the entire dune complex.
Boggs says use has been up by about 3 percent over last year at Egin Lakes, but he's still gathering numbers on other use areas for this fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30.
All that use results in trash that must be removed.
