Earth Day weekend and the weekend after will see multiple events in Ellijay connected to the environmentally conscious day.
An Earth Day Fair presented by Coosawattee River Resort will debut at River Park Saturday, April 22, from 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
The first-time event at the South Main Street park will feature vendors with ties to Earth-friendly activities or practices, as well as live music and food vendors.
Some of the vendors expected to participate include the Gilmer County Beekeepers, Gilmer Animal Shelter (with pet adoptions), Gilmer Master Gardeners (with a plant sale) and the Georgia Forestry Commission. The event is free to attend and open to the public. It will feature educational booths and activities for all ages, noted Michele Kellogg, CRR lifestyles director.
“In school, you used to go to the science fair and see all the displays on things like what honeybees do for the environment and do things like digging for earthworms. We’re putting (these kinds of experiences) into a fair version,” said Kellogg. “The main theme of it is to educate the community about waste and the effect it has on our towns and on a global level, and also (show the importance) of things like growing sustainable food and taking care of our forests and wildlife.”
Also on Saturday, April 22, the Georgia Mountain Trail Fest will take place at Harrison Park, on McCutchen Street, from 9 a.m.-4 p.m. It is free to attend and open to the public.
The trail fest will coincide with the Friends of Harrison Park Sasquatch Strut 5K and Fun Run, which starts at 8 a.m. that morning.
Robert Ferguson, trail fest organizer and Georgia Mountain Trails Partnership (GMTP) CEO, said this year’s event finds the GMTP partnering with Friends of Harrison Park and Keep Gilmer Beautiful to “celebrate our trails on Earth Day with a Leave No Trace theme to the event.”
“We’ll have tons of speakers and presentations throughout the day including (the announcement of) our community being named an official Benton MacKaye Trail Town,” said Ferguson. “We’ll have award-winning author and naturalist Mark Warren with us all day doing walks along the Ellijay River pointing out native plants and explaining how the Cherokee used these plants. We will also have food trucks and local beer and cider.”
Keep Gilmer Beautiful (KGB), which has presented various Earth Day events and cleanups in years past, will be active at the trail fest this year, noted Ashley McGowan, KGB chair.
“Members of our team will be helping with the trail fest recycling. We’ll be using our loner bins, (which are part of our) recycling program,” she added.
Keep Gilmer Beautiful will hold its electronics recycling event the following Saturday, April 29, from 9 a.m.-1 p.m, in the courthouse parking lot. The e-recycling day is an opportunity to drop off unwanted electronic devices and gadgets, mostly for free.
Collected items will, in turn, be recycled by contracted company Atlanta Recycling Solutions. The same company has handled the take-in and truck loading processes for KGB’s past e-recycling events.
Most electronic items can be dropped off for free, but there is a small charge for larger items like TVs and CRT devices, McGowan said.
“(This event) has been really successful, and we’ve heard from a lot of people in the community that they save their devices for this event each year,” she added.
There will not be a communitywide Earth Day cleanup this year, but, as a Keep America Beautiful affiliate, many of KGB’s Adopt-A-Road volunteers will be participating in the nationwide Great American Cleanup through June 21.
“We are in the midst of the Great American Cleanup (right now),” said McGowan. “We’re encouraging citizens in our Adopt-A-Road program to clean up in a concerted effort during this time, either by doing their scheduled cleanups in preparation for Earth Day or doing extra cleanups.”
Several littered roads in the county are still in need of adoption, noted McGowan.
“It has to be a county road, and it has to be approved that it can be adopted,” she added. “We have businesses and organizations that adopt roads that may not be directly in front of their businesses, but may be closer to their homes or are areas that are problematic to the county because of dumping.”
McGowan said KGB members will also be in local schools over Earth Day week talking to classes about recycling and other environmentally conscious practices.
“Last year, we did Ellijay Elementary School, but we’re hoping to branch out to some of the other elementary schools for Earth Day to educate them about ways they can encourage themselves and their families to recycle and dispose of trash in a proper manner,” she added.