Sierra Club Lizard’s Mouth Cleanup

By Robert Bernstein

What a wonderful group of people who turned out for our Sierra Club Lizard’s Mouth Cleanup!

Here are all my photos!

Thanks to Andrea for bringing your energetic daughter Elizabeth and her energetic friend Reta!

They boldly went where some of us adults had never gone before!

Occasionally we got lucky and found intact bottles like this

But more often we had to get down in the dirt and pick out broken glass shards as UCSB Materials Science grad student Virginia is doing here

And Elizabeth, Diana and Merlie are doing the same here

At least half the trash was in and around a beautiful cave in the middle of the area. Here we paused with our take from the cave after cleaning it up

Climbing through the brush was needed to retrieve bits that had washed down during rain storms

And other trash got washed into narrow gullies. Tatiana, Diana, Virginia and Heidi are climbing out of one here:

Here the group posed above another long gully where trash was retrieved

And Wendy (purple top) leads the group coming up from some lower gullies

There was less graffiti than in some past years. This was someone’s idea of “art” to create an eye. Creative, maybe, but also rather destructive.

Elizabeth and Reta had to climb into it and pose

And Merlie popped out of another hole

That area offered a spectacular view of Goleta and the airport below

We stopped by the memorial marker of Nicholas Markowitz

We passed some other wonderful scenery before making our way back to the cave area

We then climbed up the back of the lizard

And onto the tip of the nose of the lizard!

We then dropped down under the Lizard’s Mouth to look straight up to the roof of its mouth!

And under its chin

Which looks a bit like miniature cliff dwellings

Here are some views from further back that show the whole front and underside of the Lizard

And some other interesting rock formations

We made our way back to the cars

Where we proudly displayed our catch

Ironic that two of the bottles we found are a tribute to this wonderful place!

Our total take was 27 pounds, which was less than the 33 pounds we took last year. And way less than the 49 pounds we hauled out in 2014. I think things are generally getting cleaner. That is good news!