Nearby, nine other volunteers, including Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon, gathered the floating waste with old tennis rackets, rakes and children's jai-lai paddles as the garbage containers in the middle of their canoes slowly filled to near overflowing.

"You name it and we've probably found it floating in this river," said Jeff Salt of Great Salt Lakekeeper, an environmental group that organized the volunteer cleanup effort Saturday. "Over the years we've pulled 270 shopping carts, hundreds of tires and tons of trash from the water."

The Jordan River, which Salt describes as Utah's most urbanized river system, flows 44 miles from Utah Lake north through three counties and 16 municipalities before draining into the Great Salt Lake.

Along its meandering course through residential neighborhoods and industrial parks, the Jordan serves as the exit point for hundreds of storm water pipes that allow waste to enter the waterway.

"If we can stop the public from littering and keep trash from entering the river through those storm drains, the Jordan River could really be pristine along its entire length," Salt said.

From the back of his canoe, Salt looked up as Brown pulled an old pair of sandals from among the heap. "It looks like Adidas," Brown said.

Salt has been organizing river cleanup project along the Jordan River for the past five and a half years, first under the auspices of the Great Salt Lake Audubon Society and now as director of Great Salt Lakekeeper, which split off as an independent nonprofit organization two years ago.

The volunteers, in five canoes, entered the water at a boat ramp just north of the Rose Park Golf Course and headed down river toward the Salt Lake County-Davis County line, an area that Salt described as a collecting point for much of the garbage that finds its way into the river.

For Corroon, the cleanup effort marked his first venture onto the Jordan River.

"It is pretty amazing that you can get in a canoe and in a few moments feel like you're in the middle of nowhere," he said. "Although parts of the river I saw were just beautiful, all that floating garbage was really awful."

Prior to settlement by the pioneers in the 19th century, the Jordan River provided lush high desert habitat for a variety of wild species, including millions of migratory birds. The river, though, was used as the primary sewage system for valley residents until treatment plants were developed during the 1920s and 1930s, Salt said.

"Fewer traditional industrial dischargers are impacting the river all the time. The biggest problem the river faces comes from residential storm water runoff that carries oil, antifreeze, herbicides, detergents and all the other chemicals that people use around their homes," Salt said.

He said one of the goals of Great Salt Lakekeeper is to educate the public on how they can best control such urban wastes.

steve@sltrib.com