The Clean Sweep 2026 - Shift 6 Summary

Highlights:

• 9/5       Moving Day: Packed up (HOT!) and moved to "Cottonwood Club" upstream of Glasgow, MO

• 9/6      The crew took a rest day and had significant others join us for the day

• 9/7       Labor Day: Crew worked on the rack pile located at our new camp. Jay joins the crew

• 9/8       Moving Day: Crew moved down to "Rock Quarry Flat" downstream of Glasgow. Lynn, Carol Leigh, and Jeff joined for shift 6 and cleaned up in the afternoon

• 9/9       Crew scouted the river for the Glasgow Community Cleanup

• 9/10      Rainy night and morning. Slow start but did crew cleanups that afternoon and worked on Lisbon Chute

• 9/11      Crew Cleanup Day and trash haul - Some folks joined us to help with the community cleanup the next day. 

• 9/12      Glasgow Community Cleanup out of Stump Island (see results below!)

• 9/13       Moving Day: Packed up and moved to Jameson Island

This year I saw the Missouri River. All of it. If you asked me about the things I saw, I would have a difficult time finding the words to accurately describe it. I saw beauty in natural forms, from the Missouri River Breaks of Montana to the bluffs of Boone County. And massive forms of human engineering. Like the Broadwater Canal System and Garrison Dam. Both the Boone County Bluffs and the Missouri River Breaks have a natural force in common which gave them their appearance. Incomprehensible floods, the result of cycles of glacial encroachment and retreat. Before the last glacial cycles, the Missouri River flowed out of Montana into the Hudson Bay. During the glaciation, the melt waters formed huge lakes dammed by ice and rocks. Eventually the ice would melt enough to let loose floods so big that it brought change even to mountain ranges. These floods couldn’t get down the old riverbed because it was still covered with miles of ice. Water levels would get high enough to overtop old watershed boundaries. It cut its way through softer soils and bedrock and the more that eroded, the more the water flowed. Floods make major changes to the river.

We started shift 6 on a dirt bank behind a box dike, with a huge trashy log jam right next to it. I called it the “Cottonwood Club”. It was a neighborhood with a “lived-in” feel, frequently visited by geese ascertained by their large footprints and even larger poops. The baby cottonwoods were thriving. It had all the amenities except good swimming water, clean sand, and bug free. Oh, and shade. We children of the river made do with what we had. The log jam occupied our time. It had trash! We removed 539 mini-shooter bottles, 14 blue bags, and a few tires throughout our time there.

The Cottonwood Club is 6 miles above Glasgow. Thousands of years ago, around or just downriver of Glasgow. Glaciers would have corked up the river flood basin. From river bluff to river bluff. The Missouri River as we know it probably didn’t exist yet as the glaciers were still huge on the northern of it range, but the floodplain that we know was still mostly present from the inflow of the Kaw, Grand, and Platte Rivers. As melt cycles sent water down these river systems, it encountered places where it couldn’t progress downstream. As it pooled up, it would find places to flow finding new water courses or changing existing ones. One of these occurred a little upstream of our camp. As waters rose, they found their way into Salt Fork Creek in Saline County. This creek forms a semi-circle from northwest Saline County to the Southeast where it meets my favorite paddling river, the Blackwater. The Blackwater River flows into the Lamine which was most likely corked with ice at its mouth. As this water built up in the Lamine, it may have even breached into the Petite Saline Watershed that flows back into the big river near present day Wooldridge.

Our second camp location on Shift 6 was a flat sandy island across and upstream from Lisbon Bottoms. I called it the “Rock Quarry Sand Flat”. It was much nicer than the Cottonwood Club, except for the lack of walking distance trash. We couldn’t see trash but it was there. Shortly down river was a massive logjam that we spent several days cleaning and left our flesh behind on. Just a skip further downriver, Alyssa found what I dubbed the “Super Fun Site. As several of us started on the logjam, several others attacked the Super Fun Site, collecting 10 bags of trash, 4 tires and a freezer from that site alone that day. They barely scratched it. We went back that evening and when I saw it, I went straight into attack mode and fight off the hopeless feeling by just seeing this amount of garbage. Ryan came to me and said to stop because we were going to bring a big group of volunteers here during our public cleanup in 3 days. My fury told me to keep cleaning, but my mind said a lot of people was the only way to be successful. I finished filling a single bag and we left. On cleanup day, we got out 64 bags, 13 tires and lots of miscellaneous big items. All totaled, we pulled 94 bags and 30 tires from the Super Fun Site alone.

Glasgow Community Cleanup Results

Stretch Results:

• Miles: 27
• Volunteers:
  • Shift crew: 6
  • Glasgow Community Cleanup: 43
• Trash:
  • Bags: 191
  • Tires: 21
  • Refrigerators: 2
  • Mini bottles: 1312