Lenticular clouds were building in the northwest skies as the Wyoming wind whipped up the dust on Heart Mountain. The inclement weather didn’t stop Barbara Jennings from heading to her personal Earth Day project in the foothills.

Jennings, a retired school teacher and administrator who served in the inner city of Toledo, Ohio, moved to Park County with family looking for peace and quiet. After a five-year search, the family found a hidden piece of land with a million dollar view of the area’s most iconic peak.

The family spent the first years rebuilding a rustic cabin, living in the modest log structure while dreaming of constructing a house large enough for children and grandchildren. Everything was coming along as planned except for a scar on the property.

When folks were homesteading the Heart Mountain area in the 1950s, they had a community dump. Out of sight from nearby roads and only really visible on close inspection at that point, the broken glass, old wire, car parts and rusty metal from decades gone by was slowly being swallowed into the earth.

It is a forgotten relic, Jennings said, but she knew it was there.  And it kept eating at her.

“I’ve been known to come up here and listen to football games and just kind of focus on the lights at the football field. It’s kind of fun,” she said as she packed her baseball cap in her coat pocket rather than chase it down the hill in the wind.

On Earth Day, 2020, she decided to start cleaning up the debris. She was motivated by the celebration, which has been celebrated on April 22 since 1970. 

She could have joined a volunteer crew taking down old fences or cleaning up the banks of a nearby river, but she knew she and her family members were the only people who would ever care enough to clean the old dump.

She soon realized cleaning one day a year wasn’t going to get the mess properly disposed of and recycled, so she made a pledge to work on it every year, usually starting in February and continuing until the bugs and snakes start to get vicious. 

“They like to eat me,” she said with a smile.

For hours, week after week, she faces the cold and steep incline digging up garbage and shaking out the dirt before putting the refuse in her bucket. 

“Lets keep the dirt on the mountain,” she said after finding a large can full of soil.

Then she found an old Spam canned meat key, a perfect perfume or medicine bottle and a child’s forgotten toy truck. 

“It’s a treasure hunt every day,” she said.

Recently she was excited to find a perfect blue marble, the perfect metaphor for how she would love to see the earth: clean, recovered and well loved.

It’s not just a cleaning service for Jennings. 

It’s also a sociological study of an agriculture community in the mid 20th century — how they lived and what was thrown away. She recycles it all, giving her a chance to inspect it when she gets home with buckets and repurposed seed bags full of metal and glass. 

“Now everything is in plastic,” she grumbled.

She hasn’t counted the buckets-full of material she has already recycled. She just knows there’s a lot left. 

The task is a labor of love, though some don’t understand why she’s putting so much effort into this forgotten place. 

“This was on my list of things I’d do when I had time. And all of a sudden, I had the time,” she said of retirement. “We have to protect the Earth in all the little ways we can. And here’s this beautiful area that I live in. And I get that in the ‘50s and ‘60s, this was the dump. But now it’s 2022 and I, in good conscience, have to pick it up and recycle everything.”

Except for an engine that required help from a family member to get up the hill and the fancy bottles she’s collected, she has recycled hundreds of pounds of metal and glass at Cody and Powell recycling centers. 

Her last task of the day was to drag an old truck bench seat frame up the hill, which was partially covered in snow. The seat was nearly taller than she, but despite her 72 years, she’s strong and seemingly tireless. 

“[People] ask, why are you doing this? Why are you wasting your time? My answer was because I just have to do it for the animals,” she said.

“One of these snowstorms that we’ve had in February or early March, I looked out my kitchen window, I picked up the binoculars, and there were 17 deer, all resting in the sage,” she explained. “And I had picked up that whole area. They didn’t have to sit in cans and glass and trash. That’s why I’m picking up the side of the hill.”

After an offer of help from a chubby photographer, she refused, saying she prefers to do it herself, and she proceeded to march to the top of the slide with heavy bucket, tools and the bench seat in tow.

The official Earth Day website posted a message for the new year: “We need to act (boldly), innovate (broadly), and implement (equitably). It’s going to take all of us.”

Earth Day now includes events in more than 193 countries, which are now coordinated globally by the Earth Day Network. 

But it doesn’t take an organized event to get in on the celebration. You can help by simply finding a mess and cleaning it up, Jennings said. 

“Every little bit helps,” she said.