The East Bay Trash Pandas are recruiting a volunteer to paddle Cerrito Creek under the I-580 and I-80 bridge complexes and document the encampment trash feeding Albany Marsh — leverage, they hope, to force a stalled CalTrans cleanup.

The ask went up on r/bayarea this week, and it is not a normal one: a volunteer kayaker, willing to paddle a canoe up Cerrito Creek and under two bridge complexes at high tide, to photograph what nobody wants to walk under.

The request comes from the East Bay Trash Pandas, the volunteer group that has spent months hauling shopping carts, mattresses, and needles out of Albany Marsh — the same crew a reader may remember from the Saturday they pulled a haul out of the wetland and collected $90 in parking tickets for the trouble. This time they are not organizing a cleanup. They are trying to document a source.

Most of the marsh's trash, the group's post says, traces upstream to an extensive run of encampments tucked under the bridge complexes where I-580 and the railroad, and then Cleveland Avenue, I-80, and Pierce Street, span Cerrito Creek. CalTrans, according to the post, holds an active work ticket to clear those camps — number 1042293 — but has not answered when, or whether, the work will happen.

Hence the kayak. The organizer is blunt about not going in on foot: human and animal waste, needles, leptospirosis and hantavirus risk, and residents who may not welcome a camera. From the water, the post reasons, is safer — the creek runs at least 30 feet wide at high tide, with 10 to 20 feet of clearance under the spans. Waivers will be signed. The pay is a handshake and, the group jokes, all the internet points a volunteer can farm.

The tactic is not new for them. The Trash Pandas openly bet on what they call high-definition public shaming: their own site credits a round of it with finally getting UC Berkeley to clear an illegal dump above Grizzly Peak. A camera under the Cerrito Creek bridges is the same wager, aimed this time at CalTrans.

The thread was modest — a handful of upvotes, a few comments. Whether a paddler turns up is anyone's guess. What's certain is what's still there: the camps under the concrete, the ticket unanswered, and the creek carrying the rest of it down into the marsh.