6th Annual Cleaner Clear River Cleanup!

October 4, 2025

It’s time to sign up for the 6th Annual river cleanup everyone talks about. A Cleaner Clear. OCTOBER 4! Mark those calendars and sign up above!

SPONSORSHIP!

Want to help buy supplies, refreshments, trash bags, gas money, gloves, grabbers, printing, event insurance, or all the other things needed to pull our clean up together? Donate below!

PLATINUM gets you all the awesomeness of the GOLD and SILVER levels plus your huge logo at the top of all our fliers, sponsorship banner at all events for the year, at least 5 callouts and a video of thanks on our Social Media outlets that reach over 550 followers.

GOLD gets you all this and a call out on our cleanup blog posts and your name on the event invitations and your logo (with link to your website) on our blog posts.

SILVER gets you a call out on social for all our cleanups and your logo on the A Cleaner Clear sponsorship banner and fliers.

Or donate easier here through Venmo:

Imagine you are a fish. Bulging eyes, pulsing gills, unattractive lips, locked into a small stream where you were hatched with a hundred of your siblings, now competing for survival from night herons and flash floods. Your quaint watery home among the moss and swirling eddies is shaded by waving willows and Russian Olives which are shaded themselves by towering overpasses and massive concrete bridges that vibrate the earth under the loads of unforeseen tons of vehicle weight flying by like coughing dragons.

You are swimming along, fighting the unpredictable current when your throat (do fish have throats?) gets tight and the water becomes noticeably murky. Then you realize, “oh no, I’m in a plastic bag!” This near weightless cocoon of thin plastic had floated down river into your little piece of paradise and is now swallowing you up like a humpback whale. You start darting around trying to find the opening with your bulging eyes even larger and crazier than usual, and the next thing you know, you’re dead.

David Attenborough would have quite the narrative on the trials of life for a smallmouth bass fighting for survival in Clear Creek in the heart of Denver, Colorado. His raspy voice and British inflections would make the whole scene more colorful, and the fish would live happily ever after.

Not in our Clear Creek though. Hell no. If the heavy metals from hundred-year-old mines in the western mountains don’t suffocate you or give you a third nipple (fish for sure don’t have nipples), the runoff from dirty city streets or an errant piss bottle thrown from a hundred feet above off I-25 will.

But it’s not just the fish and other critters that live in the water that get the short end of the stick from us disgusting humans. It’s us, the disgusting humans as well. I have a theory that if Americans ran out of donuts and someone packaged up our own waste and put enough food coloring, artificial flavors, and frosting on it, we’d eat it. Example: We know for a fact that eating heavily processed foods is terrible for our heart (that thing that miraculously keeps ticking), yet we keep building fast food joints every time a new suburb pops up. America runs on Dunkin’.

“NEW! Glazed feces donuts! For a limited time! Get ‘em while they’re hot!”  Cue the line around the block.

We humans have a choice on everything we do. The environment in an urban setting? Not so much. She’s been manipulated and violated so many times she is standing there shaking like a chained up tick-ridden neglected dog on a cold block of ice. Therefore, comrades, it is our responsibility to look up from our phones and give a few hours now and again to the only planet we have.

According to the most recent surveys on national water quality from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, nearly half of our rivers and streams and more than one-third of our lakes are polluted and unfit for swimming, fishing, and drinking. The Clean Water Act, passed into law 50 years ago, made significant strides in cleaning up the country’s waterways by the 1990s and 2000s, with one 2000 EPA report estimating an additional 16,507 miles of rivers and streams were made swimmable because of the act. An additional 24,713 miles had also been made fishable.

Every year the selfless volunteers supporting A Cleaner Clear pick up so much trash out of Clear Creek, we sit there in stunned silence wondering how a mere 365 days of neglect could see so much junk return to a happy little babbling brook.

We have no answers to this problem, therefore we’ll continue to clean up trash every time we leave the house and will bottle up my frustrations through gritted teeth in an attempt not to completely give up hope on the human race.

This year we will be teaming up with our old friends and sponsors like Prodigy Coffeehouse, Archery Games Denver, Grand Salon, Scoops Ice Cream, Stranahan’s, Patagonia Denver, TOPO Designs, Riversmith, Anglers All, and many more who care as much about clean water as The Confluences does. These steadfast sponsors help make our small rabble of industrious boots on the ground team make picking up weird stuff out of a creek fun and safe.

This momentous day will live on in history as the 6th annual river cleanup on Colorado’s most polluted stretch of waterways. Clear Creek. There will be food and prizes beyond your wildest dreams.

Let’s keep the trend going on October 4^th by getting in there and getting dirty!