Karl Teske of North Aurora, a member of St. Charles Canoe & Kayak Club, was ready to offer the services of his watercraft and himself to cleaning up the Fox River this weekend.

“I’ve been a part of all of these clean-up sessions,” he said on Saturday at an It’s Our Fox River Day clean-up effort along the river in St. Charles sponsored by the River Corridor Foundation in partnership with the St. Charles Park District and The Conservation Foundation.

The St. Charles effort was just one of many clean-up and restoration events on Saturday coordinated by The Friends of the Fox River group all along the waterway from up in Wisconsin to down in Yorkville for It’s Our Fox River Day.

Teske noted the importance of the efforts to clean the Fox River.

“You collect more things in a boat than people can get on the shore. One year, we had 10 tires in here,” Teske said as he unloaded his canoe at Ferson Creek Park in St. Charles just before 9 a.m.  Saturday for the clean-up effort along the Fox River in the city. “The challenging thing is coming back from upstream because we’re fully loaded and the boat is very unstable. This thing is packed solid every year.”

John Rabchuk, president of the River Corridor Foundation, said the annual clean-up effort along the Fox River collects a wide variety of items.

“Every year, it’s a different amount of stuff we pick up,” he said. “Some years, it’s a lot with everything from car bumpers to lawn chairs to tires and a lot of plastic bottles.”

Jill Voegtle of West Chicago said she, like Teske, has participated in many clean-up efforts along the river.

“Our environment is hugely important and we need to take care of it,” Voegtle said. “It’s our ethnical responsibility to take care of our environment.”

Elizabeth Rago of St. Charles said she has brought her children every year to the clean-up event along the Fox River in the city.

“My dad is with a canoe club and we’ve been cleaning up the river before there even was an event like this,” she said.

Rabchuk said the annual clean-up event along the Fox River in St. Charles has “grown tremendously” over the years.

“The first year, we had maybe 40 or 50 people and last year, we had over 150 involved,” he said.

Rabchuk said all the work to promote the importance of keeping the Fox River clean seems to be working.

“I think that people are much more conscientious about stuff. The things that really concern you are the things that are big that somebody just dumped into the river like rolls of carpeting or a bumper or a lot of construction material like safety cones,” he said. “That didn’t blow in from somebody’s dock. Each year, it we tracked it, I would say the amount of trash we have collected has gone down substantially.”

David Sharos is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.