Butterfield is his canyon, and he's keeping it clean

HERRIMAN — People do a lot of things in retirement. They go fishing, they golf, they travel, they swing in a hammock, they do nothing.

Then there's Bill Allinson. He cleans up a canyon.

Bill is 79. He retired 19 years ago after working 23 years at Kennecott Copper and another 21 in corrections at the Utah State Prison. Ever since, he's been his own boss. Well, other than his wife, Suzanne. They've lived in the same house in Riverton for 56 years, the one Bill built when they were newly married. They have a condo in Mesquite, Nevada, they escape to now and then in the winter.

But Bill's favorite place to be, bar none, is Butterfield Canyon, a pine- and aspen-covered mountainside located just outside the western boundary of the Kennecott Copper Mine in the southwest corner of Salt Lake County.

The canyon has been Bill's playground since before he can remember. He played here as a kid. He's picnicked here more times than he can count. He's hunted deer in the steep ravines all his life. And in his golden years, he's appointed himself chief of waste management.

Soon after he retired, it became his habit to drive his truck to the canyon entrance and take a brisk walk along the paved road.

The more he walked, the more he began to notice that others who traveled Butterfield Canyon tended to use it as a garbage can.

He also noticed that nobody was picking up the trash.

About five years ago, just after his 74th birthday, he decided to take matters into his own hands. He adopted a new routine: he would park his truck, walk up the road a ways, collect any garbage he found, then walk back to the truck to throw it in the back and drive to where he left off and do another lap.

On Mondays, he'd cover the entire 6.5-mile stretch to the summit, on Wednesdays and Fridays he'd go shorter distances.

Just like that, Butterfield Canyon had a garbage man.

In the process, Bill discovered two things: No. 1, there's always going to be trash, and No. 2, picking it up has put an extra bounce in his step.

"I have so much love and pride for this canyon," he said as he finished one of his recent runs. "I get so much self-satisfaction out of doing this."

He does get some raised eyebrows, however.

"People ask me, 'Why do you go and do what you do?'" he chuckles. "When I tell them I enjoy it, they think I'm crazy."

Through the years his garbage runs — he starts religiously at 6:30 a.m. and finishes three or so hours later — have become sacrosanct.

"This is my time," says Bill. "My wife knows, everyone knows. It's just a relief to come up in this canyon. It's neat, you get up here and your mind changes. I don't worry about nothing. It's good therapy."

It's also a good workout. He figures he's hauled 20 tons of garbage out of the canyon over the years. The most prevalent are beer cans and takeout fast-food wrappers. If he had a nickel for every KFC box he's picked up.

But there's also big stuff — couches, appliances, mattresses and the occasional car or motorcycle. Some are abandoned, others stolen and stripped. Bill has a winch on the front of his truck to help lift the heavy items out; he calls the county to take care of anything he can't.

"See, people have to pay over at the (county) dump," he explains, "so they come up here and dump it for nothing."

Besides cleaning up other people's messes, the regular jaunts up and down the canyon give Bill the chance to trip regularly down memory lane.

He grew up in Lark, a mining town a mile north of Butterfield Canyon that Kennecott bought and turned into a ghost town (no one's lived in Lark since 1977; all that's left is the water tower). Butterfield Canyon — which by the way was named for Thomas Jefferson Butterfield, Bill's great-great-grandfather — is where people from Lark came to recreate.

On a slow drive up the canyon in his Toyota Tacoma, Bill points out flashes from his past: there's the location of the two mines where his dad once worked, back when silver and zinc were in good supply; there's the spot his sister's house once stood (the house was later moved to South Jordan and she's still living in it); there's the meadow where the dance hall stood when his mother danced as a girl. Now all of it exists only in Bill's mind.

"Look at this," he gushes as he gestures at the beauty in a canyon that gets a fraction of the visits as canyons on the east side of the valley. "People are missing out on so much. They'll go to Lagoon and other places and spend hundreds of dollars. You can go up here for three bucks for the gas."

Bill doesn't seem to worry that more traffic would mean more trash. Not only has he proven adept at keeping the canyon clean as a whistle, doing so has also been a factor in keeping him going after heart surgery (he has a pacemaker) and a cancer scare (they had to remove part of his nose but for now he's in the clear).

"My doctor says don't stop, just keep going," says Bill.

Even after the canyon road closes on Nov. 1 — the road isn't maintained through the winter months — Bill will continue his sojourns, at least until the snow gets too deep.

Then he'll wait for spring to see what garbage Mother Nature has unearthed for him to haul out of his canyon.

Related topics