A story from the 2026 Fox-Wolf Watershed Cleanup
Every spring, the Fox-Wolf Watershed comes back into focus. Not because the creeks, streams, and rivers reawaken for the year, but because the people who depend on them show up to prove they still care.
This year, more than 1,800 volunteers turned out across 80 sites for the 2026 Fox-Wolf Annual Cleanup, hauling 7,143 pounds of debris from riverbanks, parks, and shorelines stretching across the watershed. It was, by most measures, one of the biggest years yet.
The haul told its own story. Justin Yeager walked the entire North Island trail and came back with roughly 60 pounds. “I found an antenna to a radio, an outlet cable I pulled out of the ground that was like four feet long, and a cinderblock,” he said. “And I found $5 that I donated.” At Pierce Park, Wendy Lewandowski and a group of ten wrestled a tire and a muffler out of a ravine. At the kayak launch, one volunteer described standing in the same spot for 20 minutes: “Just picking up little scraps of plastic and water bottles and everything. Everyone kept saying, I bet we could come out here every time there’s a big storm and do the same thing.”
The variety of what people found would almost be funny if it weren’t for what it implies. A boat anchor. Fishing lures. Broken glass. A syringe. The kinds of things that don’t biodegrade and don’t stay put, especially after a heavy rain. Across all 80 sites, volunteers pulled 19 tires, 12 pieces of electronics, 1,889 plastic straws, and 28 syringes from the watershed.
Jesse Huck, a UW-Stevens Point student who spent spring break doing a similar project on the Mississippi with Living Lands and Waters, framed it in terms bigger than any single riverbank: “If we don’t pick it up here, it’s going to keep going down into the Fox River, and if they don’t pick it up there, it’s going to go all the way out into the Great Lakes.”
It wasn’t just college students making the connection. Megan MacCallum brought kids from Fox River Academy to Pearson Park, where they turned up vintage bottles and an old tire alongside the usual litter. “They need to understand that it’s a team effort when we’re taking care of our community,” she said. Wendy Lewandowski’s group of six kids called it the best day ever. Paxton, one of the younger volunteers on site, explained his reasoning without much prompting: “Animals could get trapped in it or choke on it.”
Seven-year veteran Carrie Gazelle has watched the event grow steadily since her first time out. “I’ve definitely seen a lot more people,” she said. “I think the word gets out and people find out about it and get interested.” Jennifer Meyer, a first-year site leader, noticed the same thing from a different angle: “The volunteers who had been there for years, they all knew what to do. A lot of them frequent that park. It was kind of neat to help pick up trash in our own neighborhood.”
That sense of ownership is the point. As Justin Yeager put it: “Look at how many people are here coming together just to clean up and be there for each other. The future generations are just as important as the current one.”
Watershed Moments is a quarterly publication from the Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance, sharing true stories of people whose lives have been shaped by water—and the moments that sparked their care for it.
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