Editor’s Note: This article was written for Mosaic, an independent journalism training program for high school students who report and photograph stories under the guidance of professional journalists.

More than 80 people spent part of the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday stuffing clothes, bottle caps, and food littering Coyote Creek into trash bags, and pulling shopping carts and television monitors from the creek bed.

As part of the 10th Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful cleanup, volunteers worked along a section of the creek next to Selma Olinder Park near the location of a recent homeless encampment.

Jeweliette Pearson, a volunteer coordinator for the cleanup, said the volunteer workers made “great progress” in removing trash.

“We had a lot of people … which is great,” she said.

Each volunteer received a neon vest with the “Volunteer” printed on the back, gloves, a metal claw-like trash picker, and a big green plastic bag. Participants were then told to form groups of eight and were assigned a leader. Each leader led their group to a designated section of the creek to clean up. Volunteers made their way down a steep hill to begin work.

In the creek, they discovered two shopping carts. Volunteers worked together to wrangle the carts from the mud and carry them and full green trash bags up the steep embankment.

In total, they filled 124 bags of trash weighing 4 tons from Coyote Creek.

One of the student volunteers was Gitansh Balani, a freshman at Evergreen Valley High School in San Jose.

“I volunteered because it’s a break day, and then I want to help out the community as much as I can,” he said. In addition, by helping in the cleanup, he chalks up volunteer hours required by his school.

Jasmine Tam, a freshman from Lynbrook High School in San Jose, also volunteered to receive service hours for school.

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Coyote Creek extends 63.6 miles and has the largest watershed among creeks in Santa Clara County. Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful organizes cleanups, plantings, recreational and cultural activities, and education programs.

“Our purpose is really to build community around Coyote Creek,” said Deb Kramer, the organization’s executive director. “And our mission is to engage, educate and encourage people by bringing the community together to take action.”

Kramer called the creek a wonderful natural resource for San Jose and Santa Clara County. ”We want people to enjoy it,” she said, “but also take care of it.”

For more information about Keep Coyote Creek Beautiful visit www.keepcoyotecreekbeautiful.org.

Brittany Pierola Diaz is a senior at Del Mar High School in San Jose.