Rock climbers with the Allied Climbers of San Diego make a trip to Mount Woodson at least once a year to pick up trash, and when possible, remove graffiti.
The climbers’ advocacy organization is dedicated to promoting and maintaining access to climbing and outdoor recreation, said Josh Higgins, a founding member who is CEO of the all-volunteer nonprofit.
“It’s purely helping the environment and keeping the area we recreate in clean and nice,” said Higgins, 47, who lives in the UTC community of San Diego. “We love the outdoors and we want to recreate in beautiful places. We want to keep them nice.”
Margarita Bellah
Allied Climbers of San Diego volunteers are dedicated to promoting and maintaining access to climbing and outdoor recreation. (Margarita Bellah)
Higgins said about 100 volunteers out of as many as 1,000 club members show up to pick-up trash on clean-up days. They mostly come across a lot of water bottles at Mount Woodson but also remove dog poop and random trash in the area, he said.
About 20 bags of trash were discarded after their Feb. 28 clean-up effort at Mount Woodson, he said, about a month before the new trail parking lot officially opened. The plastic gets recycled and the nonrecyclables go to the landfill, he said.
“We’re definitely trying to make it better for everyone,” he said.
Allied Climbers of San Diego focus their clean-up days on climbing areas in and around San Diego County. Their territory includes Mission Trails Regional Park in San Diego, Lake Dixon in Escondido, Santee Boulders and portions of El Cajon Mountain, known as El Capitan, in the Cuyamaca Mountains.
Higgins said their biggest hauls of waste come from the active dumping grounds at El Cajon Mountain. That’s where club climbers find hot tubs, appliances and assorted car parts, he said.
“People use it for their construction dumping,” he said. “We’ve removed tens of thousands of pounds of trash there. We have a dumpster brought in and it gets filled.”
Although less trash is collected at Mount Woodson, Higgins said the group would like to regain access to a road there so they can remove graffiti from the rocks and boulders.
Volunteers used to bring thousands of pounds of equipment, a water pressure washer and graffiti removal chemicals to Mount Woodson. But that changed after the COVID pandemic when the city of San Diego stopped unlocking a gate that gave them access to the road they used to haul their equipment up, he said.
Higgins said the city cooperated with their graffiti cleanups for about a decade, then for an unknown reason they refused to open the gate about two years ago, he said.
“The graffiti never stopped,” he said. “Constant maintenance needs to happen. We hope to get it back to what it was. They need to open the gate or give us the key, because we’re not able to do the graffiti removal at this time.”
Margarita Bellah
Rock climbers pick up water bottles and other trash at least once a year at Mount Woodson. (Margarita Bellah)
Many of the crew who showed at Mount Woodson on Feb. 28 went climbing on the mountain and around Potato Chip Rock before and after the clean-up, Higgins said.
“It’s famous across the country for its bouldering and climbing,” he said, adding that the new parking lot’s limited hours and $5 daily parking fee may be a deterrent for some climbers. “People have been climbing there for at least 60 years.”