West Mud Creek is pictured at Faulkner Park in Tyler on Oct. 2, 2018.(Sarah A. Miller/Tyler Morning Telegraph)

Thousands of plastic bottles are overflowing from a creek. Soccer balls and basketballs are piled on top of the bottles, with no one to play with them in sight. Nearby, a broken stove is sitting on its side in the middle of a field.

This is on the outside edge of Tyler’s Faulkner Park, one of the largest and most popular parks in the city, where years of effort have gone to making the area a popular place for recreation. And it’s been like this for years.

Running down the edge of the park is West Mud Creek, which traverses much of the southern part of the city, picking up trash along the way before reaching the park. The creek is known among hikers, bikers, and nature lovers for its excessive amount of litter.

“It’s dangerous, and it’s unsightly, and it’s not the way nature should be,” said Beverly Guthrie, the chapter director of the East Texas Master Naturalists. “I think we need a little more city involvement as far as finding out what is actually happening and where the trash is coming from.”

Russ Jackson, the parks and recreation director for the city of Tyler, said the litter is a problem for humans, animals, and the parks alike. He said the city does cleanup campaigns and often sends volunteers to the parks, but that residents also need to stop littering.

“It’s going to go into the creeks,” he said of the litter. “It’s gonna go into the water system that goes into the oceans, and it hurts every aspect in your environment. It’s causing a problem, and, ultimately, it causes a problem with us.”

The Creek

West Mud Creek starts near East Southeast Loop 323 and runs south past Bishop Gorman Catholic School, through Rose Rudman Park, crosses under South Broadway Avenue near the intersection with Grande Boulevard, and continues until it merges into another creek outside the Bullard city limits.

Before getting to Bullard, a portion of the creek goes through the southwestern part of Faulkner Park, near Toll 49. The creek also runs near Blue Ridge Trail, a popular trail for hikers, near some of the 6 miles of trails in Faulkner Park that are popular among mountain bikers.

Aristeo “A-Rod” Rodriguez, 37, a mountain biker, said the creek has been filled with litter for years, and there seems to be no way to stop it. He said he and his friends have tried to clean up the creek, but the litter always comes back.

“Three years ago, we assembled a little group of folks, and we tried to clean that, but it was just awful,” Rodriguez said. “I can’t remember how many bags of trash we did, and it was just hours.

“What it is is just based on how much water’s flowing through there, because all of that trash comes from upstream and it just flows down, just pretty much off the highway, off the road,” he said.

On a recent afternoon in December, parts of the Blue Ridge Trail had puddles of water from a recent rain. The creek had receded back to its normal level and appeared to have been cleaned. But some plastic bottles were stuck in the creek wall near a high-water line.

Other plastic bottles were sitting in piles of leaves on land near the Blue Ridge Trail after the water had washed them up during the recent rain. In another part of the creek, a broken piece of sheetrock was sticking up, apparently not washed down the stream because tree limbs were blocking it.

Guthrie, the master naturalist, said the litter is hazardous to humans, animals and the environment alike.

She said there’s no way of knowing what people throw out in trash bags, be it plastic bottles or medical injection supplies. She said she has seen prescription pill bottles — with pills in them — floating down waterways. 

“The plastic bottles will never go away,” Guthrie said. “They’ll eventually wash into the ocean if they can find a way to get there, and then there’s a huge problem. They do wash into our lakes and rivers and I mean, aesthetically, it’s a terrible problem.”

Jackson largely echoed Guthrie. He added that the litter affects the food that humans eventually eat, such as fish, and the coral reefs. He said he wonders how much time humans have to take care of the oceans before it is too late.

“I truly believe the city is doing the best we can, but it’s very difficult when it’s in a mass area (to be) constantly turning around, and doing it without raising taxes, and doing more,” he said.

Angela Bennis, the community coordinator for Keep Tyler Beautiful, a city government initiative that combines the work of the Parks Department and the Solid Waste Department, said her group has done work on general litter, but not the specific issue in West Mud Creek.

Bennis pointed to work Keep Tyler Beautiful did to get a grant for encouraging proper disposal of cigarette butts. As part of that project, the city installed disposal containers throughout downtown Tyler so the butts wouldn’t be left on sidewalks.

Jackson said his department sends volunteers out to clean up the Blue Ridge Trail area when there are complaints, and that the city sets up cleanup campaigns twice a year to clean up litter after the rainy seasons.

“Once we get reports of it, we just have to put it on the to do list, and that’s the main thing, is just making sure it gets taken care of. We just can’t do it every month. There’s just not any possible way of doing it that way.”

He said he would need to evaluate whether to do cleanup differently, including looking at whether another city department needs to be involved. He said that’s hard when the city is already playing catchup with staffing for maintaining the parks.

“You constantly go back and forth, and we just don’t have the manpower for that,” he said. “But the volunteers typically are doing it all the time.”

Proposed solutions

Hue Adams, a master naturalist, is one of the volunteers who helps clean up the creek. He said he and some other master naturalists started cleaning up the Blue Ridge Trail and West Mud Creek area after they saw the litter problem while out on hikes this summer.

Adams said the group is usually out every week cleaning things up, but he described the group’s role as “reactive” instead of preventative. He said the master naturalists would be happy to help the city execute a long-term solution, but they’re not free help.

Guthrie said the city government needs to find the source of the problem and prevent the flow of litter down the creek. She said her group has connections with Texas Parks and Wildlife and the Texas A&M Agriculture Extension and would be happy to connect the city with their experts.

She said a hydrologist would be able to analyze how the city’s water flow system may contribute to the litter moving downstream in places like West Mud Creek. She said one issue is the city’s use of concrete drainage systems, and she pointed to one located on Elk River Road, right by the Blue Ridge Trail.

The concrete structure attracts heat, and the water speeds up when heated, Guthrie said. An alternative would be to create wetland-like areas upstream that capture water before flooding occurs or streams rise, she said.

Jackson said all ideas are welcome, and he should consider them as they come. He said his team often meets with the master naturalists, and any other residents who want to help should share ideas with the city, such as at monthly meetings of the city’s Parks Board. But, he said he is continually frustrated seeing the amount of littering people do in Tyler.

“Every place I go, plus my home, has a trash can, but the window of my car is not the trash can receptacle,” Jackson said. He said people should throw the trash from their cars outside of gas stations, grocery stores, the post office or in the trash cans at parks and on mountain biking trails.

He said it’s easy to tell from driving around the streets of Tyler that residents are throwing trash out of their car windows. The city pays for street sweepers twice a year, but the litter always comes back, and some gets washed into storm drains, he said.

“When (people) go to my parks, instead of using the trash cans there, they’re throwing the trash on the ground,” he said. “At sporting events, they throw the trash on the bleachers.

“The mentality is, ‘It’s not my problem,’ and they’re dead wrong. It is their problem.”

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