On Saturday, June 21, MITA staff and dedicated volunteers, 11 in all converged in South Addison to do our annual clean up. Dense fog caused us to reconsider our plans, and we all decided to clean Tibbett’s Island, just off the end of the South Addison Peninsula. Although Tibbet’s is not on the Trail, it was just acquired by the Great Auk Land Trust (http://www.greatauk.org/) and is open for public use. Part of the purchase money came from Land for Maine’s Future bond money, so thank you to Maine taxpayers.

Islands that have not been cleaned before usually have lots of ‘embedded” trash, jugs, plastic, and other flotsam that gets into the pucker brush and then slowly gets absorbed. You don’t see the plastic as much as hear it when you walk over it and it crunches beneath your feet.


It was extremely satisfying: we cleared more than 30 bags of trash, plus 9 tires. Several boat runs were made back to the dock to unload so we could get more. We managed to get to a few other islands, and the total tire count was 11 and 50 bags of trash were removed on this solstice day.