Three months after the first Earth Day was celebrated, a group of 8th grade boys and their camp counselors canoed down the entire Connecticut River.
They were known as the Becket Adventurers of 1970, led by Mr. Sidney DuPont, a math teacher at Becket Academy in East Haddam.
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WATCH HERESylvester Salcedo, now residing in Orange, was 13 years old and a student of DuPont's when he embarked on this journey.
The goal of this expedition was to spread awareness of the poor treatment of the environment that was common in the 1960s.
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SIGN UP "Many of the rivers in the United States were heavily polluted because of industrial discharge and a lot of poor practices in terms of protecting our rivers and streams," said Salcedo.
The Becket Adventurers took a bus to the Canadian border with their canoes in tow and started their six-week journey in July of 1970.
According to Salcedo's recollections, they canoed about 20 miles each day and collected different types of data at each turn.
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Salcedo shared photos he took during this trip, as well as the findings that the Connecticut River Museum in Essex still has to this day.
The data was rather unsettling.
"Here's a sample of a direct discharge from a huge, almost a foot-wide pipe that is unfiltered, and there's a note there that said 'The test went off our charts. No reading possible' because the pollution level was just too high," Salcedo said of the findings.
After the first Earth Day was celebrated on April 22, 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was created in December of that year.
While the Connecticut River is much healthier today, we still need to take good care of it.
"It made us aware that these waterways that we have, these natural resources, are very fragile," said Salcedo.
