Add The California Post on Google A beloved Eastern Sierra lake hid a dirty secret beneath its glassy surface for years — including two guns, piles of tires and “thousands and thousands of beer cans.”
Over five days in September, a team of 23 volunteers from Tahoe nonprofit Clean Up The Lake completed 18 dives along 3.89 miles of shoreline to strip the Upper Twin Lake of 4,999 pieces of submerged litter.
Scuba divers hauled more than 2,400 pounds of trash out of the lake in California’s Bridgeport — including 1,376 cans, 24 tires, 31 anchors — in a sweeping underwater cleanup that also turned up two handguns.
“One of the handguns was an old derringer and the other a revolver. They were very small, kind of like ones you might put in a purse or be able to conceal much easier. They looked to me a bit older,” Colin West, founder and CEO of Clean Up The Lake, told The California Post Wednesday.
West said both guns surfaced during one single drive during the cleanup and were handed over to the Mono County Sheriff’s Department.
Among the trash pulled from the water were nine “heavy lift” items that required special effort, and the divers also identified two concentrated “litter hot spots.”
“We came across big old metal pipes that were like 6 feet long and a foot wide, a bunch of anchors chained together that were probably used to moor a small boat, 20 tires and thousands and thousands of beer cans,” he said.
West said the full dive effort was “crunched” into a single week and the divers circumnavigated the entire lake, carving it up into roughly 20 underwater segments.
He said that CUTL’s cleanup operation is a choreographed assembly line of divers, snorkelers, kayakers and boat crews. Divers drop beneath the surface with yellow mesh bags and inflatable lift bags for heavier objects.
“Each diver might have 5 or 6 yellow mesh bags when they go down. They’ll fill those bags up, and then they’ll shoot it up to the surface … or to a free diver above them.”
Heavier items like tires and fishing poles get rigged and lifted separately.
“If they come across a tire, they’ll use those lift bags and they have rope and things that they rig around it and then up goes the tire to the surface. … The kayakers and the snorkelers will work to load those tires or those full mesh bags onto the kayak or the boat captain will come by and they’ll grab all the trash and load it into the boat.”
Back at the dock or marina, the trash gets bagged, tagged and coded to specific dives so CUTL can map exactly where certain types of litter pile up.
The nonprofit also identified two litter “hot spots” in Upper Twin Lake — areas where trash has piled up heavily. West said those hot zones are no mystery.
West pointed to a busy resort road near the lake as a major contributor to the underwater junk pile up.
“There’s a lot of people fishing along the side of that road and there’s a pretty high level of wind that came out over the peaks. I believe, with the access of everyone on that main road and then the winds … any beer cans or anything that would fall into the lake would start collecting on the northwest side of Upper Twin Lake,” he said.
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