BELLINGHAM - After a quick drive through the west end of the Columbia neighborhood, with their eyes peeled for old Christmas trees, the Boy Scouts got out, put on their gloves and started dragging the evergreens from the sidewalks to the street corners.
"So we're pulling 'em, and somebody else picks 'em up?" asked 16-year-old Kameron Mensing. "OK."
That's the quickest way to go about it, when you're gathering up many of the old Christmas trees in a neighborhood with narrow streets.
Tight corners don't do many favors for trucks with trailers, so the first wave of Scouts focused on collecting the trees into bunches, and the second wave loaded those into the truck to be hauled away.
Christmas tree pickup is an annual service project for Boy Scouts of America Troop 4006 and about two dozen others around the county.
On Saturday, Jan. 7, all of Whatcom County was carved up into sections by different troops offering to recycle the trees.
Starting at 8 a.m. sharp, trees were collected and dropped off in the parking lot of the Meridian Street Haggen store, where they were packed into dump trucks - whose drivers also donated their time - to be stuffed into a wood chipper and turned into mulch for Bellingham parks.
The purpose is a free public service, but the Troop 4006 brings in an average of more than $3,000 in donations to help pay for a summer camping trip. They explained the event in the 3,000 leaflets they distributed in the Bellingham area last week.
Some people still staple their donations to the trees, but that's not as common nowadays because handing them directly to the Scouts or mailing in a check is safer.
"We don't want to forget envelopes attached to the trees," said Scoutmaster Nick Solberg, "because then we'd be taking them to the shredder."
Sometimes it takes a couple of trips to take care of a single street.
"The first tree we picked up, it was the whole length of that trailer," said Nick's son Eric Solberg, a high school sophomore who has helped out each year since first grade. "And that was heavy."
Reach Caleb Hutton at caleb.hutton@bellinghamherald.com or call 360-715-2276.
