Someone went to a lot of trouble to dump a yellow boat in the middle of nowhere

There are few places more convenient to dump unwanted junk than the desert in the middle of nowhere. There are also fewer places more illegal to do that dumping. After 30 years of working with Wyoming Waste Systems in Sweetwater County, it takes a lot for something to stand out to Michelle Foote. The abandoned yellow Bayliner boat that her team had to haul out of the desert north of Rock Springs this past week makes the cut.

“This is the first time that we’ve gone out and recovered something to this extent,” she told Cowboy State Daily. “It’s not in our usual wheelhouse, to be quite honest.” Someone went through a tremendous amount of effort to load, haul, and dump the hard-topped power boat in a ravine where the dumper, presumably, thought it’d be out of sight, out of mind. The irony is that they needn’t have done it at all.

“If they lived within Rock Springs, they could’ve taken it to the landfill free of charge, and it’s only a slight fee for Green River residents,” Foote said. “Somebody went through a lot of effort to dump it in that spot. Why they did is beyond me.”

Foote said some of her employees spotted the abandoned boat while exploring the area on side-by-sides. It appeared to have been there for several months. The boat was sitting at the bottom of a small ravine. The team used a winch to haul it out and onto the flat surface above, then winched it onto a roll-off box. After tying it down, they called the Sweetwater Solid Waste District No. 1 office to report that a boat was sailing toward the landfill. “They put it in the pit and buried it,” Foote said. “No problem.”

They checked the boat for anything that might identify its previous owner, but nothing turned up. “The only thing we found is that it had been registered up to 2014,” she said. There were no bodies of water nearby. Foote had to assume the watercraft was deliberately dumped at that spot along Lion Kol Road past the Rock Springs BLM Horse Corrals. “There wasn’t a trailer out there,” she said. “Whoever dumped the boat had to load it up, go out there, pick that spot, and somehow get it off their trailer, whether they pushed it or had to break hard enough for it to fall off.”

Lion Kol Road is essentially a dead end. The boat abandoner would have had to haul it along several roads, including a section of U.S. Highway 19, to reach it. The landfill would’ve accepted and disposed of the boat without question. “It was definitely deliberate,” Foote said. “You already have it loaded, so why not take it to the appropriate spot where it can be processed or handled correctly, instead of littering up our desert and littering up our community?”

The yellow Bayliner is an extreme example of a larger problem of people dumping trash, construction debris and non-running vehicles in the middle of nowhere. It took three dump trucks to haul away more than 6 tons of illegally dumped garbage on public land near Riverton in 2022. Six men packed three eight-yard dump trucks with 12,280 pounds of washers, dryers, furniture, and other household trash over the course of one workday, the Wyoming Department of Transportation said at the time.

Wyoming Waste Systems has been doing non-hazardous solid waste disposal in Sweetwater, Carbon, Fremont, and Uinta counties since 1992. The company sponsors annual waste cleanups in Rock Springs and Green River. “People volunteer and pick up several tons of trash, and we provide the dumpsters to haul that trash to the landfill,” Foote said. She believes many Sweetwater County residents aren’t aware of everything they can take to the local landfill, and how little it costs. “They are open seven days a week, 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.,” she said. “If you live within Rock Springs, you can go take your items there for free of charge, and there’s only a slight fee for Green River residents with excess trash.” The Sweetwater County Solid Waste Disposal District 1 is only a 17-minute drive from where the boat was dumped.

“I want to believe that it’s a lack of education rather than doing it to be defiant,” Foote said. “The desert is not your personal dump. You’ve got to take certain steps to make sure things are processed. They have that ability at the Sweetwater County landfill, so it blows my mind that people don’t use it.” Foote and her 25 employees take pride in keeping their community clean. “All of us are very much interactive within our community, and very much want to keep it looking nice,” she said. “That’s what drove us to go ahead and remove that boat from the desert. It was an eyesore, and nobody wants that in their community.” The abandoned boat is going to stand out in Foote’s memory. It was a confusing find, the result of an even more confusing decision and effort that will probably only make sense to the person who dumped it.