Earth Day 2013: Golden Gate Park pot party a major mess [View all]

[Leslie Valley]

San Francisco park workers and volunteers spent much of Sunday picking up and hauling away 10,000 pounds of garbage strewn all over the eastern part of Golden Gate Park known as Hippie Hill, the remnants of Saturday's annual yet unofficial pot-smoking bacchanalia.
But this year's annual celebration - which falls each year on April 20 and is known as "420" - drew a larger-than-average crowd of between 10,000 and 15,000 revelers on the warm weekend day. They proceeded to smoke, drink, eat and rack up more than $10,000 in costs for city crews to clean up the mess, ironically just before Earth Day.
Even by early Sunday afternoon, mounds of empty bags of chips, candy wrappers, snack containers, plastic cups, bottles and other debris still remained to be picked up, the fallout of what appeared to an enormous, collective case of the munchies.

Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Golden-Gate-Park-pot-party-a-major-mess-4451852.php#ixzz2REJlqirP