Anchorage Daily News

Hundreds of volunteers mucked through 15 Anchorage-area creeks and streams on Saturday, plucking out tires and trash cans, plastic bags and tennis balls, as part of the Anchorage Waterways Council creek cleanup.

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A coconut from Westchester Lagoon.

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A pair of boxer shorts with a leopard-print pattern.

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Saturday was one of the best-attended cleanups in years, thanks in part to beautiful spring weather, said Deb Essex, one of the organizers. As many as 500 people participated, in watersheds from Eagle River to Girdwood.

This is the 25th anniversary of the event, she said.

• As people gathered afterward at Valley of the Moon Park, Jenna Weaver, one of the volunteers, hauled a derelict bike to a tarp where some of the more remarkable trashy finds were displayed.

The bike wasn't the most memorable creek detritus from her morning culling the banks. That honor went to something far more gross.

"We found a milk jug full of either beer or pee," she said.

What other items, icky and strange, were fished from the city's creeks? Here's some highlights from the soggy trash pile:

• a suitcase

• half of a sofa

• a comforter

• five to 10 bikes

• a 50-gallon drum

• a rattan chair

• a pink inner tube

• an old generator

• a social security card

• two inflatable rafts

• a barbecue grill

• a bar stool

• a small refrigerator

• a fishing pole

• a string of Tibetan prayer flags

• a '50s kitchen chair

• a skateboard

• a purple plastic sled

• two bowling balls

• a giant stuffed moose

• a hockey mask painted to look like a skull

• a traffic cone

• mismatched flip-flops

• a laundry basket

• a pair of leopard-print silk boxer shorts

• a kitchen sink

• a coconut

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