Why is Little Rocky Glen Preserve closed?

Countryside Conservancy owns and manages 20 preserves across Lackawanna, Susquehanna and Wyoming counties, ranging in size from 5 acres up to 419 acres. Every preserve is managed differently depending on access, size, topography, hydrology, flora and fauna. When appropriate, the Conservancy encourages responsible low-impact recreation but does not manage preserves like a park. Preserve users must “carry-in, carry-out” all of their garbage and leave no trace.

The Conservancy also oversees 1,445 acres of privately owned lands under conservation easement and 5.1 miles of the Trolley Trail. 

The annual operating budget for Countryside Conservancy is funded through a combination of sources: approximately 400 membership families; foundations; and fundraisers like NEPA Gives, our Annual Auction and our Autumn Appeal. While we have been successful in securing state funding for constructing the Trolley Trail and acquiring specific properties, all of the money spent maintaining our trails and preserves comes from private donations each year. 

90% of the Conservancy’s stewardship budget is spent on Little Rocky Glen – more than our other 19 preserves COMBINED. 

Conservancy staff and volunteers visit Little Rocky Glen at the beginning of every week between May and October, at a minimum. During particularly high use times in the summer, it is not uncommon for the Conservancy to clean up the Glen two or three times per week – hauling out multiple contractor bags of garbage every trip. 

The model we successfully use on our other 19 preserves is “Carry-in, Carry-out.” The idea is that if you are capable of carrying in your drinks and food, etc., then you are more than capable of carrying out the empty containers at the end of your stay. In fact, it should even be much lighter! This approach to managing litter works all across the country and reduces the burden on the Conservancy to pay staff to collect and properly dispose of trash. Providing garbage cans also leads to a variety of issues:
1. Shifts the cost burden of disposal completely to Countryside Conservancy.
2. Garbage cans often become a dumping spot for more household garbage than what was consumed on the property.
3. Garbage cans often become a target for squirrels, raccoons and bears – leading to an even bigger mess.

The likelihood of catching someone on a game cam at the precise moment that they litter is virtually zero. Game cams are set up to take photos when they detect motion. With upwards of 200 users on busy summer days, this would result in thousands of photos being taken. A camera set up at a distance to capture a wide swath of users would probably produce fairly poor-quality photos. Setting up multiple, closer cameras, each of which taking thousands of photos, would create a massive amount of content to review. These game cams would also have to be set up for cellular transmission to ensure that photos are backed up in the event that the cameras or their SIM cards were stolen (something that indeed happened the only time that we attempted to use a game cam at the Glen). Without electricity at the Glen, batteries would need to be frequently changed in the cameras due to the heavy draw of taking that many photos and transmitting them. The cost of the cameras, batteries, cloud services, plus staff time to sift through (tens of) thousands of photos, combined with the remote chance of actually catching someone in the act of littering, would essentially create a costly needle-in-the-haystack approach that would be very unlikely to produce fruitful results. There have been successful uses of game cameras to catch litterers, but that usually involves a very specific, remote location where the only person caught on the game cam is the person doing the dumping and it’s fairly obvious when they unload their truck at the end of dirt road, etc.