SCOTT DETROW, HOST:
Cleaning up road trash often involves people in orange vests walking along a highway with those little grabbers and plastic bags. In Oregon, there is an annual trash pickup event that's more like a party. Thousands of people come together to drive hundreds of miles of forest service roads, picking up trash by day and then camping out with live music at night. KUOW's Matt Martin was there this weekend.
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MATT MARTIN, BYLINE: That's trash crashing into a huge dumpster in a field in the small town of Madras, Oregon. It's part of the Gambler 500. The gimmick is to buy a junky car for $500 and gamble on whether or not you can get it running. Once you do, you take that car to race on public lands and collect as much garbage as possible.
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UNIDENTIFIED PERSON: Woah.
MARTIN: These cars are heavily modified and painted wild colors. A truck with a dragon on the hood that spits real flames or a car frame with a boat Frankensteined (ph) onto it, known as a Lam-boat-ghini (ph). Tate Morgan founded the Gambler 500. He says it's a way to gamify public service.
TATE MORGAN: It's the "Mary Poppins," you know, a spoonful of sugar thing, you know? If you just said, hey, let's go pick up trash, you would get a half a dozen people. But if you set up this big, cool challenge where people could let their freak flag fly and build crazy, weird cars and not be put in a box, then this is what happens.
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MARTIN: It really is a party. RVs and tents dot the field. There are food vendors and concerts. It's like Burning Man meets "Mad Max" meets the Sierra Club. Robert Kenton wears a top hat and jacket covered in patches from past Gambler events. He's never missed one since 2018. He says all the regulars have grown up and experienced life together.
ROBERT KENTON: We've gotten married. We've gotten divorced. We've had kids - you know, cancer, births, suicides, stuff like that. So we all kind of just become this kind of weirdly dysfunctional off-roading group family.
MARTIN: The Gambler 500 has spread beyond Oregon. Satellite groups have popped up from California to New York. Tate Morgan is happy his idea has taken hold.
MORGAN: I think we've also addressed a certain portion of our society and outdoor users who didn't fit in the archetype of how people wanted to define environmentalists and stewardship.
MARTIN: These gamblers have removed more than 5 million pounds from public lands in Oregon over the years - a testament to the group's slogan, ABG - always be gambling.
For NPR News, I'm Matt Martin in Madras, Oregon.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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