Jamie Black takes the mess at the foot of Little Mountain seriously — to the point where she found herself in a potentially serious pickle when she came across two young men intent on throwing a couch over the cliff.
Black, who has spearheaded a regular weekly cleanup of the trash pile at the base, said she was basking in the sun at the top of the cliff at 6 p.m. on March 28 when a black pickup truck pulled into the parking lot and three young men got out.
“One guy came to the edge of the cliff and said to me “Hey, we are thinking of tossing a couch over the edge,” she reported.
Unfazed, Black made it clear that doing so wasn’t a good idea.
“I said ‘Oh, well then I’ll be cleaning it up next week, because I’m not into that at all buddy’.”
The three men were undeterred and walked back to their truck, which had an old couch in the back.
Black wasn’t about to let them get away with it.
“I walked past the front of their truck hoping I could glance at a license plate number, but there wasn’t one on the front,” she said. “Then I hopped in my car. They had to back all the way down to the first driveway, and when they pulled in, they flagged for me to go past. I didn’t.”
Instead, Black discretely phoned the police.
“I just called 911 discretely on my phone on speaker phone, and kept flagging them to go down first,” she said. “It then became very obvious I was waiting to see their license plate number, so they sped out of that driveway and drove really fast down the windy Little Mountain road, too fast for me to catch their license plate numbers.”
Their instinct to get away quickly was justified, as police showed up minutes after they made their escape.
Black said it appeared the three men simply thought that throwing a dead couch off the cliff onto the existing pile of garbage was a cool thing to do. Black disagrees — strongly.
“I look forward to getting things set up in a way that makes it so this stops,” she said, “so that our youth, and anyone else who thinks that doing this is cool, will think again, and maybe get involved in cleaning things up.”
— NEWS Staff/Jamie Black
