Bear Creek Volunteer Day: A Paw-sitive Impact on the Park, Community, and Water Quality
Back to blog feedWhat do a group of first-year students, a banker, a journalist, a cohort of college staff members, and a brewery employee all have in common? A shared love of caring for the outdoors!
This week, over twenty individuals from Colorado College and the general public joined forces with Palmer Land Conservancy for a community clean-up effort at Bear Creek Regional Park, a Palmer-protected property. Working together, the volunteers removed more than 30 lbs. of dog waste from the off-leash dog park and general trash and litter from the park’s many public picnic, playground, and sports facilities. The dedicated volunteers removed nearly 200 gallons of trash from the park.
Bear Creek Dog Park ranks among the top off-leash dog parks in the country, with over 100,000 visitors annually. The increasing number of visitors has also led to an increase in dog waste, which, when left behind, can cause contamination of local water sources due to stormwater runoff (yuck!). This stormwater ends up in the irrigation ditches that produce a lot of our local food in the Lower Arkansas Valley. The combined efforts of our volunteers, therefore, help preserve not only the pristine beauty of the park but also the health and welfare of the local community and the communities downstream who also produce our food.







