Van Life in a National Forest 🌲 - I Found Something That Left Me Unsure

You might be wondering how I ended up here today, and I ended up here because I didn't have a lot of battery, so I figured I'd drive and try and charge my battery a bit, but also, tried to go to this one place where I thought that maybe I could camp, and found out that I couldn't camp whenever I got there. So, now I'm driving around and trying to find a campsite, and I found quite a few places to camp, but I haven't decided on one yet. This is a one-lane road, so I'm just gonna take it. I just started driving on this road. I'm in a national forest right now. I found that these types of side quests often add a little spice to the day, even if you don't end up going anywhere in particular. So, let's see where this day brings me. So, we've made it to where we're gonna park for the night, and we're pretty close to the road and in the national forest, but hopefully we won't have any issues. This seems to be like a spot where the intention is for people to park. I just noticed at my campsite that there is a whole bunch of trash in there. Like, how does that even get back there? When the weather cleared, I decided to make my way up the small hill, through the bush and brush, and weave through the manzanilla trees to pick up all of the trash that I had saw from my campsite. I had already looked around the area to make sure that no one was camped around, and there were no other signs of another person. As I started to pick up the bags, something felt off. It didn't seem like the normal trash piles I have found in the past, tossed out into the forest. These items seemed to be placed here. There were vitamin bottles that were unopened, cans of soup and other groceries. There was a bottle from a pharmacy that had someone's name on it. It didn't seem like this was trash. It seemed like this was intentional. This person cared. They had an apple that was mostly still fresh, though their herbs and vegetables had completely dried and shriveled up to the bottom of the bag. Their cereal was growing molds, and I started to wonder if I had happened upon a stash that someone had forgotten about. What made me pause and think for far too long was the bag of letters and writings that I found, piles and piles of folded journal entries that told of the person's life and their thoughts and hopes. As a writer myself, I couldn't imagine taking all of this writing and throwing it away. Someone's heart and mind spilled onto pages of scrap paper from old advertisements and blank back-sided computer paper, just tossed out, never to be found again. So as I searched deeper, and made my way through the woods and the trees to find the other things that had been thrown about, either by the person who left this or some animal, I thought, what should I do? Should I clean up nature? Should I leave this place better than I saw it? Take all of this out of the area to make sure that everything stays clean, that somehow it doesn't end up thrown more amongst the trees and harder for anyone else to come pick up later. Or do I leave it? Do I leave it for someone who may be coming back? A lot of these things had mold on them. We did just have rain in California, a rarity, something that I don't think that they would have anticipated. But these bags had mold. The food had mold. It had looked like it had been here longer. I spent my time trying to read the food labels to see when the things expired. I spent my time trying to read the letters to see when this person was here. And nothing really told me of how long it had been. We had just transitioned from 2025 to 2026. And a lot of these things said that they expired at the end of 2025, or were still going to be good into this year. So what should I do? What is the right answer here? Do you clean up all of this, or do you leave it for the person who left it here, even if they don't come back? What would you have done? I didn't want to share much, but I shared a bit of what I found, and here it is. It's very windy today, and I don't know if you're going to be able to hear me. There's a pill bottle in there that says ***. It's from last year. I think it said August of last year. A lot of the things are rotten. There's also documents and a lot of writing here, and I don't want to throw it all away. This is what my 8th Native American mother told me. If the mamons found American baby, Personally done points out this might be true, and the chiefs and their tribe are free to ask me about what I found. My sister says that I may have a house in the neighborhood, and then also have my 2025 Metropolitan scooter. It didn't feel like it was mine to read or mine to share. As interesting as it would be for me to read into someone else's mind and heart, I wouldn't and couldn't imagine someone finding my reading and enjoying it for some type of entertainment. It wasn't providing me the information I needed either. How long has it been since this person has been here? Have they abandoned it? Are they coming back? Is it okay for me to take it? So instead, I decided to close up the bag so hopefully none of their letters and writings get any more water damage in case it rains. I took all of the things that had started to rot and I put them in a bag while placing all of the cans and non-perishables back in their bags. I figured I could hang it back on the tree and hopefully this person can come back and find it. Hopefully leaving the things that would be less likely to be eaten by an animal or thrown about in the forest would help keep the area clean waiting to see if this person would return. But I still felt guilty. I felt guilty as someone who often picks up trash and does their best to keep nature cleaner than they found it. And part of me felt like it was the wrong thing to do to take all of these things and place them back into nature hoping that they'd be safe here and that they wouldn't cause any type of environmental harm. But I also felt bad by the idea of taking these things and throwing them all away. What if it was the person's last food? What if this was their safe spot to come and grab it in case they had an emergency? And then everything was gone. What if all of their writing that they were afraid someone else would find was gone? So what do you think? What would you have done? I packed up all of the things that had started to rot and all of the trash and I put it in the double trash bags and I brought it with me and I threw it away while leaving the rest hanging on the tree hopefully better than the way that I had found it hopefully in a way where the person could come back and find it as well. And I decided that I'd come back in a month and if it was still here I could decide again if maybe taking it was actually the right thing to do.