Hope volunteers remove an entire trailer full of rubbish from homeless camp
HOPE — Hope-area resident Ryan Smith and his fellow volunteers took matters in their own hands Wednesday morning.
Smith had disseminated a call for like-minded residents to join him to remove trash and other debris from a homeless encampment on a mountain bike trail at Hope Mountain.
He and his fellow volunteers managed to collect and haul away an entire trailer full of garbage from a different location in Hope because an occupant of the Hope Mountain encampment filled up roughly six to eight large bags of trash and took it down the hill from the mountain.
“The group was still ready to go, so we decided to hit another problem spot, under the train overpass on Water Avenue,” Smith told Fraser Valley Today through Facebook Messenger. “That area has been the site [of] homeless encampments for years. It’s currently abandoned, so we did our best to make a dent in the mess. We got a huge trailer load out, but there’s still a lot more we couldn’t get this time. Much of it was frozen into the ground and down a steep embankment. We plan to organize a larger cleanup in the spring. We will need lots of help for this one.”
