The Keller family of Traverse City, Mich. stands with more than 800 cans and bottles, a variety of clothing, more than 200 plastic cups and a spatula they collected from the Torch Lake sandbar left behind by holiday weekend partiers. 

TRAVERSE CITY, Mich. — The amount of trash and left-behind items seen in the photo is staggering. After just a little more than two hours combing the sandy outcropping on Torch Lake, the Keller family collected soggy beach towels, a spatula, two credit cards, a driver’s license, an iPhone 6, two baskets of beads, sliced lunch meat, chicken bones, assorted clothing, several pairs of glasses, 200 plastic cups and 823 cans and bottles. 

The family — a melange of grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, children and cousins — powered across Torch Lake on a pontoon boat shortly after sunrise July 5 to kick off an annual post-holiday cleanup effort started five years ago.

“On the fifth everyone gets up at 7:30 or 8 a.m. and goes out to pick up cans on the sandbar,” said Julia Keller, whose oldest daughter started the effort in 2010 after spotting trash left behind while canoeing the next day. “They did it kind of spontaneously and that’s how it started. We decided to go back every year.”

Hundreds of boaters and thousands of partiers beach themselves on the sandbar each year for the Fourth of July. The family typically removes a variety of trash and a few hundred returnable cans and bottles from the lake after the party, Keller said.

Keller said the crew was surprised by the amount of refuse they found this year when they landed on the sand flats at the south edge of the lake where the party takes place.

“This year it was crazy,” Keller said. “To pick up almost 1,000 cans is crazy.”

Keller’s crew wasn’t the only group raking refuse in the aftermath. Other groups were on the sandbar before they arrived and county officials already provided some trash removal during the party.

The bulging bash concerns some locals and local law enforcement officials. Throngs of people dancing, swimming and drinking to excess at the site continue to draw more resources from law enforcement agencies each year.

Five agencies sent officers to handle more than 10,000 people who flocked to the lake to party this year, said Antrim County Sheriff Dan Bean.

“We throw everything we’ve got at it,” Bean said.

Bean’s deputies responded to 45 medical calls, made 43 marine stops and rescued four people from drowning during the party. Kalkaska deputies, Michigan State Police, Michigan Department of Natural Resources officers and parks service officials all cruised the water or walked the sand bar during the party.

Bean estimated officers arrested and hauled between 60 and 70 people off the lake to a makeshift jail and booking area in a nearby township fire hall. They also ticketed revelers for everything including littering, indecent exposure and urinating in public.

“We go through a lot of overtime,” Bean said, adding that several of his deputies work 16-18 hour days to keep the party under control.

The party is nothing new; revelers have been flocking to the sandy spot since before Bean came to the area about 30 years ago. But it has grown in recent years.

Bean attributes the increased traffic to social media sites where revelers can broadcast their plans to hundreds of friends at once.

“They can get out there to a lot more people than they used to,” Bean said.

Her family’s lakefront plot is far enough away from the action that it remains more of a spectacle to gawk at than a nuisance, Keller said.

“If you are looking for a party, it’s a good thing; if you are a resident, it’s not a good thing,” she said.

The trash left behind by the sun-baked party goers is frustrating for Keller, but she understands there is no way the police force assigned to control the impromptu gathering could ticket everyone who drops a can or flicks a cigarette butt into the water.

Instead she focuses on the positive reaction nine children in her family have had to the cleanup. They stand in the chilly water treasure hunting for cans and other post-party prizes for a few hours each year — as long as they can handle the cold.

“Generally they all want to go,” she said. “It has become part of a tradition.”

Nathan Payne writes for the Record-Eagle in Traverse City, Mich.