Scuba-diving garbage collectors who scoured the bottom of a popular fishing lake in the Eastern Sierra removed 2,433 pounds of submerged litter, including 31 stray boat anchors, 24 tires and two old handguns.
About 20 minutes southwest of Bridgeport, and adjacent to Yosemite National Park's northeastern boundary, is the resort community of Twin Lakes, an alpine getaway flanked by jagged peaks where visitors go to rent cabins, fish for trout and hike the backcountry.
Over five days in August, an underwater trash-removal crew with Tahoe nonprofit Clean Up The Lake went to work at Upper Twin Lake, scooping up junk around the 4-mile shoreline down to a depth of about 25 feet. On 18 separate dives, scuba divers descended with mesh trash bags and removed items by hand. They came away with a haul of 4,999 pieces of trash.
The group has surveyed or cleaned about 20 lakes across Northern California, including Lake Tahoe, Donner Lake, June Lake and Mammoth Lakes, and encountered all kinds of litter. In Fallen Leaf, a small lake adjacent to Tahoe, they found the metal skeleton of an old Ford Model T.
Relative to those other lakes, CUTL Executive Director Colin West said Upper Twin ranked above average for dirtiness. What stood out were dense concentrations of aluminum cans, he said: Divers pulled out 1,376 of them, mostly from beer brands like Bud Light, Coors and Busch.
"It was beer can galore," West said.
The group removed lots of fishing line and snags and also discovered two .22-caliber guns, West said. One was an old Derringer; the other a revolver. It's not the first time CUTL divers have found weapons or contraband in Sierra lakes. They turn over such items to local authorities.
They also found several "heavy lift" items, which are too large or cumbersome for divers to remove by hand. Those included a six-foot metal pipe and a cluster of boat anchors that had been chained together.
"The amount and variety of debris recovered throughout the project demonstrate how years of recreational use can leave a lasting footprint beneath the surface, even in places that appear clean from above," Clean Up The Lake said in a statement.
The cleanup was funded by the Mono County Fish and Game Fine Fund, which uses state-collected penalties to finance local environmental projects.
West said his crew conducted a pilot dive of Lower Twin Lake and came away with 70 pounds of garbage as well as the impression that it contains similar types of trash as its neighbor.
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This article originally published at Underwater cleanup at High Sierra lake reveals 2,400 pounds of trash, including 2 guns.