Campsite Cleanup #10: Leadville, Where I Once Had A Home, A Steady Job, And A Relatively Normal Life

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Hello.

It's me again, @otherbrandt, writing to you from out here in the woods as usual and hanging out with my rusty wanderlusty old Subaru, Yolo McFukitol.

Today I'm celebrating the completion of 10 successful Campsite Cleanups with exactly zero attempts on my own life in the process, and I'm doing it by returning to a place where I once had an actual apartment, a regular 9-5, and a more or less normal sort of life.

Leadville, Colorado.

It has been raining here for five days straight now, and as you might expect this has minimized my time spent outdoors exploring, and maximized my time spent huddling in my tent with a book or cuddling with a beer in my car.

The rain has only been clearing up in the evenings, so this Cleanup is hereby brought to you under the cover of cold and starry darkness.

And so behold the scatter of wet and soggy trash I found:

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Let's begin with this fine discarded plastic packaging for sour cherry flavored energy chews. We know from astrology that energy can neither be created nor destroyed, so the obvious conclusion here is that these energy chews can be chewed forever and can never be digested. The perfect snack for all of your favorite rainy-day activities. That's not how you spell scratch.

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Dead paper towel. Sorry little guy, the forest is never a friendly place for your type, especially at night. Rest in peace.

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Looks like that pack of wild Colorado pine cones has reduced this wild Colorado chicken to nothing but cartilage and bone. Brutal world out here.

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Light beer tree seed, smashed.

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Regular beer tree seed, smooshed.

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Wild Colorado pine cone eggshells.

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I think this is one of those bear-proof toilet paper roll holders meant to keep mischievous bear cubs from getting their paws on toilet paper and TP-ing people's campsites. Looks like this one didn't work too well, though, the top is broken off.

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Colorado rope python. Even small ones like this have enough constricting power to asphyxiate an adult human, and other than humans themselves they are the only species known to kill for fun. I used the whip trick to send this one into python afterlife.

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Silly sign, that is not a Wildlife Tree. That is the Ground. Geez, sometimes signs just make no sense at all.

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Well that right there is a toilet paper skeleton if I've ever seen one. I bet it's from the poor unfortunate roll that got torn out of the supposedly bear-proof holder I found earlier.

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And now it looks like the wild pine cones have found a liquor tree seed and are carrying it off to their nest. I wonder if they're going to eat it, or plant it and grow their own liquor tree? Pine cones aren't exactly known for thinking long term, so I'm guessing the former.

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Huh. I wonder what these are. I've never seen anything like this in Colorado before. Maybe tomorrow I will go ask my friendly local policeman to see if he can help me.

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Carcass of a Colorado night wirebird. I bet those wild pine cones are responsible for this mess, too. They'll kill pretty much anything they can get their bloody little scales on.

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Whiskey flask. Empty, unfortunately.

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It might not be immediately clear due to my not-great night lighting, but what you're looking at here is a huge pile of firepit ashes littered with little scraps of glass.

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I spent about half an hour picking them all up and putting them in a pile.

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Right after I finished stacking all that glass I happened across this disgusting and suspiciously stained old pizza mattress.

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So I put the glass scraps to bed on the gross pizza mattress and I tucked them into a nice cozy little ring of crap and trash so I could get me a good picture of what I thought was the whole haul…

Except,

It wasn't.

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The next morning I made a second pass and would you just look at all this shit I missed.

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Behold: the real whole haul from Campsite Cleanup #10. What a mess.

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Anyhow, here's to the first 10 cleanups survived despite human stupidity's best efforts to drive me to despair and suicide… and cheers to the second 10 🥃

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🥃 🏕 🥃

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10-9-21. It's 10 down, @brandt, and only a billion or so to go. Woohoo.