Yosemite Facelift: Gettin' Down and Dirty

If there is one thing to be said about Yosemite Valley, it’s that it is one special place. Every year there is a group of folks that make the journey to the Valley to help clean ‘er up from the busy summer season. Organized by the Yosemite Climbing Association, the Facelift draws people from all walks of life with one commonality – a love for this gorgeous natural treasure.

Armed with the coolest trash grabbers you’ve ever seen (no joke, they were cool), some sweet orange vests (NYC runway, here we come), gloves for the really dirty stuff (don’t ask) and trash bags, the 2,945 volunteers of this year’s event set out to collect anything from metal scraps from who knows what to toilet paper and cigarette butts that were left behind by the less-than-conscious visitors. The volunteers picked up 42,330 pounds of trash from trails, climbs, riversides and meadows.

To top off the great success of this event, there were slide shows and movies by icons in the climbing community. Contributors, Horny Toad being one of them, gave away goodies to be raffled off at parties to the hard working volunteers. To those that spent their time up in the Yosemite lending a helping hand to mother nature, we say thank you from the bottom of our Toad heart! And, we hope to see more do-gooders up there next year to hang out with us and get dirty.

One Toadette said this about the event, “It’s nice to know that folks still care, that there is awareness about the direct cause and effect of our actions on this planet – trash being the obvious one in this case. This is only one small, albeit beautiful, corner of the earth and this event should serve as a really good example of how we can clean up our act and have a damn good time doing it!”

The event falls in fall (pun intended), so keep your eyes peeled for dates on next year's event at www.yosemiteclimbing.org.