There’s a lot of rubbish in the Big Island’s rain forest gulches, and a Paauilo man is on a mission to remove it.
There’s a lot of rubbish in the Big Island’s rain forest gulches, and a Paauilo man is on a mission to remove it.
Steve Vujnovich, a certified mountain climbing instructor, started a pilot program to see if he can sustainably host ecotourism trips to fund his efforts to remove vehicles, full trash bags, scrap metal, batteries, plastic, tires and other garbage during gulch cleanups islandwide.
Last week, Vujnovich and a team of about a dozen workers hauled a car from Kalopa Sand Gulch on the Hamakua Coast.
“It was hot and muggy, with a lot of sticks, and a lot of unseen foreign objects that were in the grass,” Vujnovich said.
His role was to re-hitch the car, multiple times, throughout the course of more than four hours after first rappelling into the gulch with a couple of others.
“The actual extraction was difficult. It was many, many, many, many steps that had to be made for each movement,” he said.
He thinks the team lifted the car, unhitched it, re-hitched and lifted it again about 20 times before finally winching it onto the pavement to be towed to a scrapyard.
Vujnovich was exploring gulches and removing trash. But there was so much that he quickly realized the island has a human-caused environmental crisis.
He formed an LLC called Trail Rhythms.
Adventurous tourists pay the company to take them repelling. That pays the costs for Vujnovich to fund services, such as hauling the car away (the tow company donated the time and staff to get the vehicle up to the road).
According to Vujnovich, authorities were alerted about the vehicle but told him nothing could be done and that the car wasn’t stolen.
He said he became a certified instructor with the American Mountain Guides Association because the state Department of Land and Natural Resources requested he get insurance before removing the vehicle and other debris. So he got certified to qualify for a policy.
Material dumped into the gulch from the roadside, Vujnovich said, eventually ends up in the ocean and deposited on reefs.
He wants people on the Big Island to teach kids to “leave no trace.”
“When I found the car, that was it,” he said. “I was pissed.”
He decided then and there to make a difference, take on the problem and, hopefully, teach groups how to safely clean gulches.
“It’s important to keep our waterways clean,” he said. “Just as important as it is to keep our reefs clean.”
He got help last week from Gary Derego Services, a Honokaa excavating company.
Email Jeff Hansel at jhansel@hawaiitribune-herald.com.