Hardwick, Vermont

It started with a simple question.

Chelsea Ross, advisor to the Hazen Hatchery Club, reached out last fall looking for a way her students could do something real for water health in our area. Not theoretical. Not a classroom exercise. Something that mattered on the ground.

We talked through a few ideas. There are no shortages of needs when it comes to our rivers and streams. But one kept rising to the top: the tires in Cooper Brook.

Tires don’t come out of a brook easily. Especially the ones that have been sitting there for years.

If you’ve walked that stretch, you’ve seen them. Half-buried. Wedged into banks. Sitting just loose enough to move the next time water comes through. Many of them were carried and redistributed during the July 2024 flooding, shifting downstream and collecting along this reach of the brook.

So we made a plan. In March, we picked a date. May 1.

By the morning of May 1, it was clear this wasn’t going to be a small effort.

Forty-seven people showed up. Students, neighbors, and partners from the Hazen Hatchery Club, the Center for an Agricultural Economy (CAE), Trout Unlimited (NEK Chapter), the Greensboro Association, Caledonia County NRCD, and Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department, along with residents of the Granite Street Historic District, who live closest to this stretch of the brook and have seen its changes firsthand.

Members of the NEK Trout Unlimited chapter were in the brook throughout the day, helping lead the in-water work and keep things moving.

And then there was Jud Kratzer, a fish biologist with Vermont Fish and Wildlife, who showed up with enough waders to outfit the students and make sure they could actually get into the brook and do the work – the quiet MVP of the day.

The work itself was muddy. Physical. At times awkward. Tires had to be pulled, rolled, dragged, hauled up banks, stacked, and in many cases washed down before disposal. Teams formed without much discussion—some in the water, some moving debris, some staging and loading.

Five hours later, the numbers spoke for themselves:

175 tires removed.
Half a dumpster of additional debris.

That’s debris that won’t trap sediment, redirect flow, or move downstream into tighter channels during the next high water event.

The Greensboro Association provided financial support for the cleanup, helping turn a student idea into something real.

And that’s really the story.

A question from a teacher. Students willing to get their hands dirty. Partners who said yes. And a community that showed up and did the work.

This is what watershed-scale resilience looks like.