by Matt Konkle
Torque Editor-in-Chief
Matt Caldwell, Executive Director of Tread Lightly! could better be called a professional Easter egg hunter. Only the eggs he seeks are not the kind kids paint and decorate for one Sunday in March or April.
The are shiny silver specks sparkling in the desert, or discarded scraps trailside in the woods. Sometimes it is shredded tires or long-forgotten lunch wrappers.
Friday, near the Backdoor obstacle during the King of the Hammers Every Man Challenge race, it was also a phone.
One of the volunteers helping out during the morning clean-up event stumbled across it semi-buried in the sand and brought it over to Caldwell, who checked the thing but was unable to pull a number.
Remarkably, the phone still did have a charge and looked otherwise intact following its recent vacation in the sand. Additionally, the phone’s case held the owner’s driver's license and a few credit cards, which only added to the urgency of finding that owner.
So Caldwell's first instinct was to pull up social media or Google the address and try to look up the owner’s name. However, with service almost non-existent in the area, that idea was quickly ruled out.
The alternative was to drop the phone off at the KOTH lost and found booth after the clean-up project ended, and hope it somehow found its way to the rightful owner.
That is, it was the plan.
Because soon after arriving at the Chocolate Thunder portion of Friday’s clean up, a man approached Caldwell and asked if he had recently found a phone. Michael Newell, a KOTH spectator from California had put the device on the back of his truck Thursday night as he was loading something on the vehicle. He then drove away, only to realize a few minutes later he didn’t have his phone with him. Or his driver’s license, or credit cards.
A panicked nighttime search through the surrounding desert revealed nothing, so Newell used a buddy’s phone to pull up Android’s Find Your Phone app Friday morning, which took him to Chocolate Thunder.
Somehow, with hundreds of people spread out at the obstacle to watch EMC drivers roll through, Newell luckily picked the right person to ask.
"There was no way I was going to find the thing in the dark, so I woke up this morning and thought, man, this phone could really have been anywhere out there,” Newell said. “And then we thought, there has to be an app to track the phone to see where it was. So we pinged it, and it came back to here. And I was hoping it was still here because once you get out into the desert, there isn’t any reception.”
Newell tried to give Caldwell some money for returning the phone, but Caldwell refused — just happy to do his part reuniting owner and phone. But Newell persisted and so Caldwell relented with the caveat the money would go right to the Tread Lightly! cause.
”This will be a big help paying for future important clean-ups like today,” Caldwell said.
Newell, now cradling his phone like he just recovered a lost child, said that was an excellent idea.
”Thanks so much for returning my phone and for all you guys do,” he continued. “It’s great work and very much appreciated.”
Friday’s Tread Lightly! clean up event at KOTH didn’t really need that kind of luck though to be successful. It just needed volunteers and more than a dozen answered the call — grabbing gloves and trash bags before fanning out into the dusty desert around Backdoor and Chocolate Thunder.
It didn’t take long to find things that didn’t belong in the Johnson Valley desert. Things other than that phone. Stuff like beer and soda cans soon became leaders on the trash scoreboard, followed closely by discarded masks, hunks of paper towels, cigarette butts, vape pens, water bottles, even a broken hairdryer and two brake rotors with cables made the list.
Every volunteer worked hard and before the event wound down close to noon, one of Tread Lightly’s truck beds was overflowing with twenty-plus full contractor trash bags. And the desert was left a little cleaner in the process.
”Days like today are important because this is like the Super Bowl of off-road racing,” Caldwell said. “So for us, it is really about leading by example. We want people to see us out here cleaning up the desert even though it is during the event, so that they will feel compelled when they go back to their trails to do the same thing. If everybody would jump in and do their part, that’s where trail access is going to continue to be supported from.”
”We need everybody to help, whether it is joining Tread Lightly!, joining your local club, or organizing a clean-up on your own, there are programs out there to help and support you with that. Find a way to do your part, be part of the community, give back to public lands and make sure we have trail access for years to come.”
