Diver Tim Lunney stands in front of a pile of trash he and other volunteers with the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council pulled out of the Deschutes River during last year’s Stream Stewardship Day river cleanup.Submitted photo

Kolleen Yake and her volunteers won’t need a license when they go fishing on the Deschutes River this weekend.

That’s because instead of salmon or trout, the group will be trying to sink their hooks into trash.

“We find almost everything,” said Yake, education director with the Upper Deschutes Watershed Council, which will be cleaning a portion of the river that runs from Farewell Bend Park to Tumalo Creek Kayak & Canoe’s on Saturday. The cleanup is part of the 19th annual Stream Stewardship Day (See If you go.)

The Bend Paddle Trail Alliance in 2012 figured that at least 2,000 people per day used the Deschutes River for activities, such as tubing, kayaking or stand-up paddle boarding at the height of the summer, said Laurel Brauns, marketing director with Tumalo Creek Kayak & Canoe.

Traffic has likely picked up since then and estimates it could now be as high as 2,500 people per day.

“Unfortunately,” Yake said, “the amount of in-stream debris has also picked up dramatically.”

Yake and her team of volunteers found a GoPro camera, 20 different sets of keys, flip-flops and glasses during last year’s stewardship day alone. They also found a wallet with $17 cash, which Yake thinks might have belonged to a Central Oregon Community College student. Yake’s group has also plucked several large pieces of metal left over from the days when timber was ferried to the Shevlin-Hixon and Brooks-Scanlon mills 30 years ago; four chairs and an umbrella that blew off Red Robin Gourmet Burger restaurant’s patio on a windy day and a bike that wound up in the river for unknown reasons.

Braun said her sports equipment rental company tells each one of its customers, “if you don’t want to lose something, don’t bring it with you” whenever they take a trip out on the river. Not every person listens to this piece of advice, she said, adding some of the items Yake’s volunteer crew found during last year’s cleanup probably belonged to her clients.

Divers from Central Oregon Diving Club and Central Oregon Search and Rescue work closely with Bend Trail Alliance boaters during a river cleanup. Volunteers also walk along the river banks to pick up trash.

“Last year, we had a couple hundred volunteers, which was wonderful,” she said, adding that the council and its volunteers collected 100 bags of trash from the river’s banks alone. “The good news is that we got it out of there. The bad news is that it was there in the first place.”

— Reporter: 541-617-7816, mmclean@bendbulletin.com

(This article has been corrected. The original version misidentified the meet-up location for volunteers. The Bulletin regrets the error.)