North Cooper Lake Park

I went for another walk at North Cooper Lake Park again today. Just needed to do something quick to work some of yesterdays miles out of my legs. My map had plenty of little unexplored spurs on it, so I figured I'd hit as many of those as I could in an hour.

It looked like somebody had been out there with a leaf blower on the main trail, and one of the spurs that I'd noticed the previous day looked a little more leaf-blown than before. Hmm... I followed it.

And, man, the junk I found.

One hour something...

Appliances galore.

A car, half buried, with a tree growing on top of it!

An old homemade trailer.

The sheer volume of appliances and other large items suggested more than a casual dumping ground. Had this place been a landfill?

As it turned out, I didn't have to wait long for the answer. I heard a leaf blower in the distance, and before long, came upon the guy wielding it. He confirmed my suspicions. Yep. It had been a landfill. Some of it had been buried long ago, but more recently, the dirt that was excavated from the ball fields on Concord (Brinkley Park?) had been dumped there to cover up what was still exposed. With that knowledge, a bit of quick Googlage resulted in additional confirmation when I got home.

I got a shot of the old water treatment building too.

When I'd passed it in the woods though, it looked like the land had been cleared, and I wondered if it had been demolished the day before or something. Turned out I was just looking in the wrong place. I'd mentioned that I thought it was gone to the other guy though, and I imagine he might think that I'm crazy.

There are still more trails out there. It might take another trip or two to hit them all. Fortunately it's not a huge piece of land.