Photos by Sara Woods except where noted.
The year I started working as Friends’ stewardship coordinator, I had barely gotten my feet under me when our land trust purchased the land we would call Turtle Haven Preserve. It was exciting to witness a new acquisition take place and to anticipate exploring all the preserve’s nooks and crannies.
Soon, though, my enthusiasm changed to panic as I realized that this scenic site had an overwhelmingly untidy side to it. This stunning natural area, home to the western pond turtle, was also home to decades of abandoned rubble and debris that was now Friends’ responsibility.
In places, the preserve was like an oddities shop with quirky, rusty, old objects that had potential to be repurposed. It was a lawn-art mecca, a collector’s oasis, an antiquer’s El Dorado.
Okay, I may be exaggerating, but the site did have 11 deserted buildings, seven cars, three golf carts, three trailers, and a boat, plus old wood stoves, washers, dryers, furnaces, tires, and broken furniture strewn everywhere. You get the picture: there was a mass of refuse and debris.
With so many layers of junk, the project was going to take a lot of time and money. Early on, we held a volunteer clean-up work party, filling a 30-yard dumpster in no time. But our efforts seemed futile.
For the next few years, new land acquisitions and other projects kept me busy and safely distracted from the clean-up at Turtle Haven. Until this past fall, when Friends hired a certified deconstruction contractor to begin work. Their specialty is taking down buildings to maximize reuse, and doing much of the work by hand, without heavy equipment. The crew worked 600 hours deconstructing eight buildings and removing 50 tons of material off the preserve. Thirty-five of those tons—mostly wood, metal, and concrete—were all recycled.
Today Turtle Haven looks better than ever, and while our work there is not done, it certainly complements our grander work of restoring western pond turtle habitat. We’ve been removing invasive blackberry and bullfrogs for several years, and our next steps include removing the last buildings and planting native vegetation. The mountain of rusty lawn art will soon be a faint memory of what was once there.
More About Turtle Haven Preserve: A Life-Changing Experience / Photo Essay: Western Pond Turtle Release / Endangered Turtles Brought to Their Gorge Haven
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