National park finds ingenious way to get visitors to clean up trash — and it involves free spa

Visiting a national park with friends and family can be great for a joyful getaway. However, careless visitors tend to leave behind a whole lot of litter in the middle of the natural retreats, which ruins its beauty. Yosemite National Park in California gets a footfall of about 4 million people each year and they end up leaving a massive amount of trash after leaving the park. To tackle this issue, conservationists and climbers working with the Yosemite Climbing Association came up with a brilliant way to deal with the accumulating garbage in exchange for a lucrative offer presented to visitors, as reported by Smithsonian Magazine.

The climbing association has joined hands with a local lodge for a special cause. The Rush Creek Lodge and Spa introduced the "Trade Trash for Spa Treatments" campaign that took place from September 20-24, 2023. They had previously worked with this idea in 2004 when the Yosemite Climbing Association started their Yosemite Facelift event. This event encouraged visitors to pick up bits of garbage from the national park and they paired it up with an outdoor conservation education and stewardship. In 2022, about 1,000 participants joined hands to collect 10,400 pounds of trash from the park.

The Rush Creek Lodge also recruited 55 volunteers who collected 899 pounds of trash from Groveland, which is a town outside the northwest side of Yosemite, per the website. Here is where the volunteers get rewarded for their clean-up duty. The volunteers can get complimentary spa services at the lodge in exchange for all the trash they have collected and the time they spent working on it. According to the official website of the lodge, it was mentioned that they would "provide complimentary coffee, pastries and fruit each morning, plus cool drinks in the afternoon." Not only that but also the lodge would "conclude" each day with "a celebration that includes live music, climbing-related movies and presentations, prize drawings and uplifting comradery with fellow volunteers of all ages from all over the globe."

The lodge, which has received an award for its spa treatment, provides a mineral hot tub fed by a granite waterfall. There is an aromatherapy-focused steam room, magnesium foot soaks and more that will help volunteers to relax after an afternoon of cleaning up the national park and helping to restore its natural beauty. Additionally, the Yosemite Climbing Association has also extended its clean-up efforts into other national parks in the region, including Colorado's Rocky Mountain National Park and the South Lake Tahoe area. 

Ken Yager, the founder of the Yosemite Climbing Association, spoke with 3BL Media in 2019 to speak about the Yosemite Facelift cleaning event. "In 2004, while working as a climbing guide, I was getting more and more frustrated by the vast amounts of toilet paper, baby diapers and other small trash that I had to walk through to get to the rocks with my clients," he said about his inspiration behind starting the clean-up drive. "I filled my truck with bags, safety vests and litter sticks and drove to Camp 4, employing the help of 120 members of the climbing community. We gathered 40-plus truckloads of trash. I increased the event to a five-day clean-up the next year and reached out to other park user groups for their help. I have been trying to make it more fun ever since."