Over 1,100 volunteers came out to the 29th Annual River Rally Cleanup and Environmental Expo on Saturday morning at the William S. Hart Pony Baseball and Softball Complex in Valencia. Their goal was to remove trash from the Santa Clara River between the Bouquet Canyon and McBean Parkway bridges.  According to Santa Clarita Mayor Cameron Smyth in his opening remarks before everyone got to work, volunteers just like those before him had collected almost 500,000 pounds of trash at River Rally events since the first one in 1994.   “Obviously I’m supposed to brag about Santa Clarita, but it’s easy to do,” Smyth said. “I don’t know how many other communities have over 1,000 volunteers showing up at 8 o’clock on a Saturday morning to take the time to clean up their community. So, thank you all for making Santa Clarita the wonderful place it is.”  City of Santa Clarita Mayor Cameron Smyth speaks to volunteers at the 29th annual River Rally Cleanup and Environmental Expo on Saturday morning at the William S. Hart Pony Baseball and Softball Complex. Habeba Mostafa/The Signal Among those volunteering were many groups, including Saugus High School cheerleaders, Young Marines, numerous local Boy Scout troops and even one troop from Lancaster. Dillon Jones from Troop 86 said this was his second year participating in the River Rally Cleanup.  “Where we’re from, they don’t do a lot of things like this,” he said. “We’re helping out a community. So, it’s really refreshing. You get to meet new people and you get to do a nice service.”  Volunteers are ready to work on Saturday morning at the William S. Hart Pony Baseball and Softball Complex for the 29th annual River Rally Cleanup and Environmental Expo. Habeba Mostafa/The Signal Jones added that last year, he was part of a group that found a car in the river and had dug it out with anything they could find, including tent poles. Jessica Wingo from the group still had the picture of the car on her phone.  Newhall resident Lauren Stuart and her husband, Brandon, were picking up trash in the river with their 8-year-old twins, Elodie and Owen. Stuart said this was the family’s first time participating in the cleanup and that they were there with the Trail Life USA organization. She added that she and her husband were trying to teach their kids to be service-oriented.   Right as they got into the riverbed, they found a shopping cart that had been buried in the soil.   “They (the kids), of course, wanted to see the tractor,” Stuart said. “They put the chains on it and then lifted the cart out.”  Another group at the cleanup — one that was there for the fifth year in a row — was the Boys and Girls Club of Santa Clarita Valley. Matt Carpenter, a board member of the club and also senior vice president of environmental resources for FivePoint, which was one of the sponsors of the event, said he grew up in the Santa Clarita Valley and even played baseball at the Hart Pony Baseball and Softball Complex.  Volunteers pick up trash on Saturday morning in the Santa Clara River for the 29th annual River Rally Cleanup and Environmental Expo. Habeba Mostafa/The Signal “I used to go out with a couple of friends and walk out into the river, and we would find lizards, the stream might be flowing, it might not,” he said. “That was when I first got my boots on the ground.”  In his professional life, Carpenter has been an environmental practitioner, working in the Santa Clara River watershed for almost 30 years. FivePoint, he said, became a sponsor of the River Rally in 2017, though the landowner/developer, previously known as The Newhall Land and Farming Co., has owned most of the land in Santa Clarita and has worked with the city over the years to provide space for these events to take place.  “That was actually why we got more involved,” Carpenter said. “It was like, ‘We keep doing these agreements with the city to allow them to park a bunch of cars and do all this stuff. Why aren’t we doing this?’”  Over 1,100 volunteers show up on Saturday morning in the Santa Clara River for the 29th annual River Rally Cleanup and Environmental Expo. Habeba Mostafa/The Signal He added, “We’re doing what we’re supposed to be doing in the community. We’ve got a huge investment in environmental stewardship, and we have for a century.”  Carpenter also spoke about the relationship FivePoint has with the Boys and Girls Club, their history together dating back to 1968. The first year the two organizations teamed up to do the River Rally Cleanup was in 2019. Every year since, excluding 2020 during the pandemic, he’s tried to instill in the youth the importance of what they’re doing, telling them how they’re giving back to the community that so supports them and the programs they value so much.   Volunteers dump their trash at a drop-off location on Saturday morning in the Santa Clara River during the River Rally Cleanup and Environmental Expo. Habeba Mostafa/The Signal Overall, those in the Santa Clara River picking up trash seemed more than enthusiastic to play a part in keeping the community clean. School groups, friends and families — even those with babies, making the rally a true family event — all came together for this one purpose, which was to help preserve the natural beauty of and protect the habitat for various wildlife in the last natural, free-flowing river system in Southern California.  Lindsay Schmandt, project technician for the city of Santa Clarita and organizer of the River Rally event, said she was gauging the success of the cleanup by the number of people in attendance. Just before 8 a.m., as the event was about to begin, vehicles were backed up on Valencia Boulevard as they made their way into the baseball complex. And the parking lots were packed full. But Schmandt said she was curious to find out how much trash is collected.  “All of that trash is weighed at the end of this event, and we can actually have a numeric value for the amount of trash we collected,” she said. “Sometime next week, I’ll likely have that number. It just needs to be taken to a weigh station.”  Last year, Schmandt said the event removed around 12,700 pounds of trash. Regardless of whether volunteers beat that number this year, she said that, based on what she’d seen with all the volunteers and community support, the event was already a success.  Over 1,100 volunteers show up on Saturday morning at the William S. Hart Pony Baseball and Softball Complex for the 29th annual River Rally Cleanup and Environmental Expo. Habeba Mostafa/The Signal The post River Rally Cleanup event draws over 1,100 volunteers  appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.