Scores of volunteers scour beaches.

Byline: Lewis Taylor The Register-Guard

Oregon beaches are a little bit cleaner today, thanks to hundreds of volunteers who fanned out across the state's 269 miles of coastline on Saturday as part of the annual Great Oregon Spring Beach Cleanup.

Armed with plastic bags and rubber gloves, dozens of teams scoured beaches and dunes, picking up everything from cigarette butts to medical waste to Styrofoam buoys.

"It's kind of like a treasure hunt," said Laura Osbon of Florence, co-captain of the South Jetty Beach and Dunes pickup site.

"We're finding lots of Styrofoam, plastic buckets, rope, fluorescent light bulbs. There's always tons of plastic."

Volunteers headed to the beach on a busy Saturday that coincided with the start of spring break and spring whale-watching week. At the South Jetty site, one of seven cleanup sites between Cape Perpetua and Siltcoos Outlet, trash pickers rounded up about 820 pounds of garbage, organizers said. The sites drew a total of nearly 400 volunteers and yielded 5,100 pounds of garbage, including two full-sized water heaters, 21 tires and six 55-gallon fuel drums.

"It was amazing how everybody came out in this weather," said Carole Miron, an interpretive ranger aide at Honeyman State Park, who coordinated the Lane County teams. "There was some sunshine and blue skies, but most of the time it was falling rain and everybody was enthusiastic."

Billy Jones, 9, of Florence didn't seem to mind the weather. Wearing yellow rain boots, he jumped off a sand dune and ran off in search of plastic bottles and bottle caps with the rest of his Cub Scout troop.

"We learned that if the birds eat (Styrofoam), it will make them float and they would not be able to dive down and they would starve to death," Jones said

"That's not good," added his brother, Ricky Jones, 7. "I don't like dead animals."

Along with Cub Scouts, there were Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, fraternities, sororities, hiking groups and ATV groups. Day use fees were waived for ATV riders, such as Chad Hamel from Clackamas, who came with the group Northwest Quad Riders to help with the cleanup.

"We're just trying to give some of the off-roading (crowd) a good name," Hamel said. "Everybody's always complaining about us. We might as well give some of us a good name."

Now in its 23rd year, the Oregon Beach Cleanup was begun by a Hillsboro organization now known as SOLV, which was started by the late Gov. Tom McCall. Saturday's haul helped SOLV surpass the all-time cleanup milestone of 1,000 tons of garbage. The group organizes a spring and fall beach cleanup. Because winter brings powerful storms and shoreward currents, the spring cleanup typically nets twice as much trash.

This winter's storms and flooding meant even more trash at locations such as the Siltcoos Outlet, where volunteers recovered about 2,500 pounds of trash, Miron said. The 5,100 pounds collected throughout Lane County went to the Florence waste transfer station where it was accepted free of charge.

CAPTION(S):

A group of young volunteers work their way along the beach near Florence looking for trash along the Oregon Coast.