Camping and Family – The FamilyCampman.com Camping Blog

As a lover of the outdoors, nothing gets my goat more than finding a ton of garbage when I’m taking a hike or camping with my family.  The amount of dumping that goes on is atrocious and truly unfortunate. I mean why would you decide that leaving a mattress in the woods is the correct thing to do? GRRR.

<stepping off soapbox>

There is hope though! Have you heard of CITO? CITO stands for Cache In Trash Out and is a global movement within the geocaching community to clean up the great outdoors and have a whole lot of fun doing so.

My 9 year old and I attended our first CITO event this past May and it was great. A local geocacher had organized the event to clean up Purgatory Chasm, which is an Earth Cache as well as one of my personal favorite locations within Massachusetts.

With around 20 or so fellow geocachers, we cleaned up any garbage that we found within the park as well as snagged a few geocaches along the way.   What I really enjoyed about the CITO event was the sense of sense of camaraderie among the group as we all had the same purpose of cleaning the park and finding some geocaches. Plus, there were donuts and everything is better with donuts.

Awesomeness

Overall the park was already in great shape. We had only pulled a handful of bags out with us before we had to leave.  The department of recreation had done a really good job keeping up the park clean but, we can’t say that for all areas unfortunately. What’s really cool is that CITO events happen constantly across the globe and you can even organize your own CITO if you know of an area  that needs to be cleaned up.  To find CITO events in your area or for instructions on organizing your own event, visit the CITO area at geocaching.com.

While we may not be able to change the way others behave, we all can contribute  to the clean up effort. Lets remove the garbage and leave the awesomeness.