US waterways are full of dumped tires. The ‘River Cowboy’ won’t stand for it

Tires take decades to decompose, and millions are improperly dumped every year. An intrepid group sets out to clear Kentucky's conveyor belt of trash'

In the 1980s, Russ Miller and his wife moved to a far edge of eastern Kentucky's Red River Gorge, where they built a homestead on a ridge hugged by three sides of the river. It's the kind of place you can only get to with a hand-drawn map. A place so remote that the farther and farther you drive to get to it, the more unsure you are that you are in the right place.

They would spend leisurely afternoons drifting the river in inner tubes, until they started noticing what floated alongside them: heaps of discarded junk.