Cub scouts clean up Moss Beach Park

Cub Scout Pack 255 got together on Saturday Oct 2, to do a major cleanup on Moss Beach Park. The Cub Scouts ranged from 1st through 5th grade and family members ranged from 3 years to grandparent age. We had 50-60 Scouts and family members come to the park from 2:00 - 5:30.

We did trash pickup, mowing, weeding inside and outside the playground, we swept the pavement, moved piles of dirt, swept the play structures and then fluffed the bark chips in the entire playground so that the surface would be softer and will drain the winter rains better. All of the tiles that donors placed into the park have been cleaned. The proprietor of Mountain Man Tree Trimming is a new Scouter and he climbed into the trees to tidy up some damaged branches.  Many broken and discarded toys were removed. Several volunteers also worked to install some decorative pieces that were never put into the park at the original build 6 years ago. The park is now in remarkably better shape, it’s basically as though the clock has just been rolled back several years.

As an objective measure of the progress that the Scouts accomplished, I took the accumulated green waste that was pulled out of the park to the green waste recycling center on Sunday morning. There were 24 very large garbage bags of weeds in the back of my full size pickup truck. The pile in the back was higher than the cab of the truck and on top of it all were some mats of weeds that the scouts pulled out from behind the swings. Each mat was about 4 feet by 4 feet square and there were 5 such mats of weeds. Each mat took 4 Scouts to carry out of the playground. I also took an entire truckload of discarded toys that had been left in the park and which had subsequently become broken and damaged.