Re: Trash at the springs. Please help to carry out

i'm just back from vacation that included multiple days hanging out at Pirate's Cove beach near SLO. On my first visit to the sand, I arrived around lunchtime and there were only scattered users, midweek, but there was a really large group of high schoolers set up at the far end of the beach - usually used as a "restroom" area. Already, on a Wednesday, by noon, they had BBQs burning, and music blaring, and cases and cases of beer, and lots of styrofoam packaging for their meats, and bottles and bottles of vodka, and dogs (I love dogs, its the owners sometimes I have probs with). By around 2 pm mostly they started leaving. Clearly, they were going to leave most of their crap. I saw some of the regulars go over and talk to them, but it didn't change much. As the last group left the beach, they were carrying some bags of trash with them. I later found most of this trash tossed into the bushes on the cliff-side pathway, impossible to retrieve and sure to fall eventually into the ocean below. Styrofoam and vodka bottles. One of their dogs took a crap as they were walking past us, near the waters, and they laughed, and kept going. After they were gone, I walked over to the far end of the beach and helped a young guy in his 20s pick up beer cans. There were about 50 of them, all over the sand. None of these kids were naturists of course, for what its worth. They just liked the "unregulated" spot that a nude beach provides to have their morning party. I really couldn't believe someone -- collectively, a large group of someones -- would so ridiculously trash such a beautiful place, surrounded by nature, by sea birds and seals and plant life, surrounded by naturists and beach regulars, and there was nothing one could do to stop it.

Everyone at Pirate's Cove this week was talking about the changes supposedly coming. A bunch of regulars held forth, and some college girls from Cal Poly, and a guy visiting who used to go to Gaviota until they started ticketing there under the tyranny of Ruth Coleman Queen of the DPR. The SLO County Parks department is taking control of Pirates, and has plans to pave the parking lot, install toilets, trash receptacles, upgrade the stairs and paths down to the beach, perhaps close the rope trail the regulars like to use, and establish a more defined hiking trail that would connect the beach to the community of Shell Beach to the south, not just Avila to the north. Many were talking of this as the "end" of the nude beach. It is worrisome. But all public statement I could find online seemed to indicate the county is not hoping to change the nude usage, just "formalize" the informal use of the beach and volunteer status of the upkeep/paths/stairs - perhaps liability issues now that they "own" the land. Socal naturist organization has posted that it means to them that the nude beach is being "formally" recognized too, established as it were. Will see, and will vigilantly observe, given the nightmare of San Onofre and other State Park crackdowns. SLO seems different, and hopefully they won't be stupid. The beach is a paradise. But I thought maybe the coming change will ameliorate the situation I observed, the kind of reckless trashing of the place I saw last week.