Friends of the Wissahickon (FOW) has been around for 101 years and is one of the largest and oldest friends groups in the city. In its years, it has seen how much effort and support it takes to maintain the 2,000 acres and over 50 miles of trails through the Wissahickon woods. 

As the years have progressed, it has organized ways to get volunteers out for regular park stewardship and larger cleanups. 

One of their biggest cleanups is the Annual Lincoln Drive Clean Up. This year’s event was postponed and will now take place this Saturday, April 26, from 9:00 a.m. to 12:00 p.m., coinciding with the Annual Creek Cleanup with Wissahickon Trails. It will begin at Historic Rittenhouse Town.

Shawn Green, FOW’s director of field stewardship, says the Lincoln Drive cleanup is one of the most satisfying bigger cleanups for the group of volunteers. 

They immediately see the before and after effects of tons of trash on the side of the road, but it’s also the beauty of Lincoln Drive itself that people almost never get to notice. In partnership with the streets department, they shut down two miles of the busy road for the cleanup.

“Most people know it as that terrifying road to drive on, but rarely do you get a chance to walk on it with no cars. And it’s like, it’s quiet. It’s actually beautiful. There are little stone details that you’ll find along the side of Lincoln Drive that you would have never noticed before because you’re just trying not to crash as you’re going around all these curves,” said Green. 

Green organizes a hired field crew and volunteer stewardship of the park throughout the year, and he says every day can look a little different, but it tends to follow seasonal cycles. Spring brings a lot of bigger cleanups, summer tends to involve more trail work and preparation planting, and fall is planting mode. There’s also clearing away fallen trees on trails, cleaning up graffiti, and overall litter pick-up from some of the busiest parts of the park.

They work closely alongside the Parks and Recreation department, but there are simply not enough resources for the city to do it alone.

Michelle Mancini is a regular volunteer with FOW, where she started by attending the weekly stewardship days on Wednesdays. She lives in South Philly, but her mother recently moved to a retirement community in the Northwest, and she is in the area much more frequently. 

Mancini loves the Wissahickon and how immersed she can be in nature, even in the middle of the city. She will be one of the crew leaders for this year’s Lincoln Drive clean-up. 

She has found the community of like-minded folks to be great, as they do their regular weekly clean-ups. Trash is, of course, picked up. But she said that every cleanup might look a little different, and when you start working on one small area, you realize how much you are actually uncovering. 

“Once your eyes are attuned to it, you start seeing it more and more. But also once some of the other people who are doing maybe, you know, sort of other kinds of cleaning up, cleaning up invasive species, et cetera, once they start moving some brush out, you realize there is some trash that’s been there for 20, 30, 40 years (that) we’ve found… (sometimes) even longer than that,” said Mancini. 

Green says that at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, FOW had to pivot, like many organizations, on how to continue its regular stewardship of the park, and restructure the volunteer work that folks like Mancini do. The clean-ups were cancelled that initial year, but they started the “Wissaheroes” program, something they realized they should have started even before the pandemic. 

Through the program, volunteers can sign up online and show up at recommended locations with gear they bring themselves or that can possibly be donated from FOW. 

After a personal cleanup, Wissaheroes fill out a digital trash report to help track when trash bags need to be collected. The report is how they know volunteers removed almost 4,000 pounds of litter from forests and creeks in 2023.

The creek is part of our local watershed, and everything is connected

The team at FOW wants neighbors to know that the state of the Wissahickon and the creek affects us all, and it’s important to keep the creeks and the roadways right next to the creeks clean, as they are all part of our local watershed.

The Philadelphia Water Department notes that Germantown gets its water from either the Queen Lane water treatment center or a mixture of the Queen Lane and Baxter treatment centers. Queen Lane pulls water from the Schuylkill River, and Baxter pulls water from the Delaware River. The local creeks are a source of water for the treatment centers, where it is processed and treated. 

As for the vision of the future for land and water stewardship,  FOW recognizes that climate change will be a big part of their strategy over the next five years.

Green notes that temperatures have been more aligned with what would be expected in areas further south of our region, and how native plants are being affected as a result. FOW is thinking ahead about habitat restoration and how our vegetation zone might shift in response to rising temperatures.

“What is this going to be like in five years if we continue to have really intense storms, along with cleaning up litter? It’s looking at our trails and (thinking) well, which of these trails is going to just erode really quickly, and what can we do to slow that down or just reroute the trail entirely? So a lot of it is feeling the effects of climate change,” says Green. 

FOW invites folks from all over to be a part of the Lincoln Drive clean-up, or to help Wissahickon Trails with their creek clean-up activities, and no prior experience is necessary. 

They would love for folks to sign up for their Wissaheroes program if they can’t get out to these specific events. Green says many work groups and organizations bring out a crowd of people and make it an entire volunteer work party. 

They are still working on collaborating and partnering with other neighborhood organizations they have not yet worked with, and they hope to connect with more people at these larger events. 

For questions, more information on the Lincoln Drive clean-up,  or to register, please contact Marisa Miller at miller@fow.org.