Volunteers Remove 400 Illegally Dumped Tires Near Wind Gap

On October 17 PA CleanWays,Wildlands Conservancy, Plainfield Township and the Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, along with local volunteers and businesses, joined forces to remove and properly disposed 400 tires and 1 ton of trash from Blue Mountain in Wind Gap, Plainfield Township, Northampton County to help restore the landscape of Blue Mountain to its natural beauty.

Twenty-three local volunteers worked tirelessly on an unusually cold and wet day that had brought snow to portions of the Poconos and central mountains of Pennsylvania.

The volunteers scoured the mountain, gathering up the illegally dumped tires and bringing them to the old Lehigh & New England Railroad bed for Plainfield Township to collect and transport off the mountain.

All of the tires will be recycled into items such as mulch for landscaping, aggregates for septic, drainage, foundations and asphalt, horse turf, tire derived fuel chips, crumb rubber for mat manufactures, raw materials for manufacturing, and recycled wire for the steel industry.

Funding for the cleanup was provided by DCNR, Bureau of Recreation and Conservation, under the Greenways program.

Blue Mountain is at the eastern edge of the Appalachian Mountain Range and runs 150 miles through Pennsylvania from Big Gap, west of Shippensburg, to the Delaware Water Gap along the New Jersey border. Elevations generally range from 1,400 to 1,600 feet with the highest point at 2,270 feet.

Four major rivers cut through Blue Mountain: the Delaware, Lehigh, Schuylkill and Susquehanna Rivers.

The Appalachian Trail is America’s first scenic trail and traverses part of Blue Mountain north of the town of Wind Gap in the Kittatinny Conservation Corridor. The Appalachian Trail was conceived in 1921 and completed in 1937, and stretches 2,175 miles from Georgia to Maine.

More than four million visitors enjoy the trail and greenway each year.

People of all ages can enjoy day hikes and long distance back packing journeys. Protection, maintenance, and promotion of the trail and greenway are done with more than 6,000 volunteers contributing more than 195,000 hours each year.

A greenway is a linear corridor of open space. Some greenways are land trails for hiking, biking, and other forms of recreation. Others are water trails. Still others serve to protect the environment and are not designed for people to use. A riparian buffer corridor – a protective zone of vegetation along the banks of rivers, streams, and lakes – is an example of that type of greenway.

One might think of greenways as “connections” that link our parks and open spaces to each other and to the places where we live. These greenways create entirely new ways of accessing and enjoying our land and water resources. The goal in Pennsylvania is to develop a distinguishable system of greenways that connects open spaces across the state, similar to our interstate highway system.

For more information on fighting illegal dumping, visit the PA CleanWays website.