Outgoing dumpster at the Bolstad beach approach.

To all: Hard to tell the difference between the sounds of a war or the booming sounds coming from along the beach on the night of the 4th of July. Seventeen miles of a line of bursting sky rockets going off launched by thousands of fireworks-loving folks along the way. Many campfires to be found all along the beach.

This was no different than any previous July 4th fiery extravaganzas. They do seem to be getting better at picking up after themselves as compared to years ago. Two 30-cubic-yard dumpsters were stationed at each of the six beach approaches along the peninsula. Three dumpsters caught fire during the night when hot brickettes were dumped in on top of flammable trash. They were extinguished later in the night by the fire department. All of these dumpsters were eventually filled with spent fireworks from the night before and also during beach clean-up the next day.

A lot of trash was generated as usual and most of it was removed by the conclusion of the cleanup through the efforts of Grass Roots Garbage Gang (GRGG), volunteers and also by folks coming off the beach the night of the fireworks.

There was a 9.6 high tide late at night that caught some people off guard, whereas several vehicles got caught in the water and were stuck in the sand and flooded out down in the Long Beach area. I suspect they are ruined. This tide also put out many campfires, on the plus side.

The final run from Beard’s Hollow to the Oysterville approach during the afternoon of the 5th revealed a fairly clean beach again, excepting little pieces of paper and cardboard from explosives.

Yesterday morning I went on my usual 8-mile trash picking route on up to Leadbetter Point and found it to be very clean as this area was off limits to vehicular traffic and the only fireworks that were used were in the Surfside area near the approach had already been cleaned of any fireworks trash.

It’s been foggy, sometimes damp weather the past few days with surf running 4-6 feet and light onshore winds.