If you love something, you nurture it.

Even if it requires stumbling out of bed on a Saturday morning to hoist a garbage bag on a mountain and pick up a bunch of junk.

"A lot of beer cans, a lot of cigarette butts," John Walker mused as he sifted through his orange garbage bag on Tubbs Hill under the morning sun. "That's probably what I've gotten the most of."

The Coeur d'Alene man was one of many who descended on the forested cliffs this weekend for the annual Fall Tubbs Hill Clean Up, sponsored by the Tubbs Hill Foundation and the city of Coeur d'Alene.

Veering off the dusty trail into the chaos of gnarled bushes and gravely slopes, Walker revealed spots where hordes of drinkers and smokers apparently had no urge to cover their tracks.

"Stick it in your back pockets until you get to a trash can," the elderly man wishes he could express to litterers, adding that he usually takes a trash bag on his hikes anyway. "It's not that big a deal."

These are the types who make it to the cleanup.

For about 15 to 20 years, Foundation members estimate, a gaggle of benevolent naturalists have gathered to minister aid to the beloved hiking hill.

It's a job for the terrifically devoted, those who label the trails as their places of worship and refuse to see them cluttered with the remnants of the lazy and careless.

"It's like a parking lot. Everybody uses it," Foundation President Peter Luttropp said of the small mountain. "It's so pretty, it needs to be cleaned."

The group is steady that comes out each year, he added, some daily joggers of the hill and others just kindly locals who want to keep up a community fixture.

"One of the major questions we're asked is, 'When is your cleanup day?'" Luttropp said.

The bounty was good on Saturday as the clear air lapped at the do-gooders' shoulders.

There were crusty soda bottles, abandoned blankets, weathered stuff of indeterminate origins. There were candy bars aged enough to constitute as heirlooms.

"It's amazing what you'll find in the nooks and crannies," said Linda Wolovich as she plucked up broken glass below cliffs overhanging the water.

She added it to the collection she and her husband Ted had started, which included a geocache they weren't 100 percent on what to do with.

Besides sprucing up the area where the Coeur d'Alene couple hikes year round, Linda said, the pick-up is a proper sendoff for the hill into the next season.

"It's kind of a 'Good-bye, Tubbs Hill. You can sleep more comfortably now,'" she said with a laugh.

Although Bret Rupert and his wife Lori were only visiting from Boise, he still was eager to take a garbage bag offered to him.

Even after picking up bags of dog poo and dirty Kleenexes, he had no regrets.

"It's a good cause. I think everybody in the community who uses the hill should have the same attitude," Rupert said as he climbed back on the trail after snagging another can.

Still more booty was retrieved from beneath the waves, by divers with Tom's Diving.

They collected a pirate's hoard worth of stuff, if pirates liked really tacky and grody treasure.

"We get a lot of stuff that comes off boats. Bottles, cans, sunglasses, money, jewelry," said diver James Fillmore, husband to Foundation board member Barbara Fillmore. "Spare tires ... Sometimes we find plastic lawn furniture that blew off boats."

To be sure, the hill won't stay clean forever.

Perhaps later in the day, teenagers would coast along the trails and chuck their candy wrappers. Maybe some emotionally uninvested tourists would see no point to retrieving a dropped water bottle.

But on Saturday, the tribe of Tubbs Hill devotees could prove to the world that at least some people give a care.

"No," Walker said when asked if the pick-up feels futile at all. "Because I'll come back."