Glenshee In Snowier Times
The Ski Club of Great Britain's annual Scottish slope tidy-up campaign which has seen skiers and boarders take to the slopes at Cairngorm and Nevis Range each Spring for the past three years is set to be expanded this June with the addition of a third area, Glenshee, to the programme. The Ski Club's Big Spring Clean will run at all three centres simultaneously on Sunday 12 June from 10am onwards.
Gloves and bags are provided and there will be tea and cakes for everyone who brings back a bag of litter, but volunteer participants are warned that if they plan to clean the top of the slopes at Nevis Range they'll need to buy lift tickets if they want to take the gondola up. At Cairngorm riding the funicular up is not an option, because the rules surrounding the operation of the unique mountain railway in the UK preclude walkers leaving the top station, so it's a case of hiking up with you increasingly heavy (assuming you find a lot of rubbish) bin bag before riding the train back down (entering the station at the top of you've walked up is allowed!).
"As part of our ongoing Respect the Mountain campaign we wanted to increase awareness of the environmental issues faced by resorts at the end of the season" explained the Ski Club's Emma Bebb. "Extending the Big Spring Clean to Glenshee is a positive step to spread that message even further and the clear up operation really does help the resorts tackle the problem of winter waste".
Last year 122 helpers collected 60 bags of rubbish between them. Finds over the past few years have included a decades old Marathon chocolate bar wrapper and a New York bus ticket.
The ski club launched their Respect the Mountain environmental campaign (www. respectthemountain.com) in 2004 with the aim of raising awareness with regards to environmental and safety issues connected to snowsports, funding environmental projects connected to snowsports and offering educational information to skiers, snowboarders and the snowsports industry. So far the Respect the Mountain campaign has donated £34,354.22 to a range of environmental projects from tree replanting to supporting environmental research.