High school student dedicates Life to cleaning Saugus trail

SAUGUS – The Saugus rail trail is looking a lot cleaner this week after 17-year-old resident Mark Panetta led a group of volunteers in a cleanup effort last weekend.Panetta, a junior at Malden Catholic High School, is going for the rank of Life in Saugus Boy Scout Troop 62, which is one spot below the coveted rank of Eagle Scout.?My troop is one of the few to have a policy where for their Star, Life and Eagle, you have to do a project,” said Panetta. “The point of that is when you actually go for your Eagle project, you don?t wind up making simple mistakes ? The goal is to try and give you the training, kind of like taking a practice SAT before you take the real SAT.”Panetta recruited 15 volunteers who worked on the portion of the trail that leads into Lynn. He said he decided to clean up the trail for his project after walking it with selectmen.?I walked the project a couple months back with Mike Serino,” said Panetta, who has been a Boy Scout since he was 10. “It was an absolute mess and a high concentration of trash, which was a bit unfortunate. The real influence was when I actually saw it and I saw how much trash was there, and it was a bit of shocker how somebody could litter that much. It looked like many years worth of this garbage that piled up in this one location. It was pretty sad.”Panetta said they pulled out old tires, a chain saw, giant pieces of scrap metal and even kitchen appliances.?It was very strange,” he said. “We found whole household items. It was far beyond the normal wrappers and Gatorade bottles you?d find on a normal trail.”Now that his project is done, Panetta has completed all his requirements for Life and already has his eyes set on making it to Eagle as he hopes to fix up a historical trail behind Prince Pizza for his next project.?The DPW just acquired a piece of property between Breakheart and Prince Pizza, and within that is an old historical trail and it needs to be redone,” he said. “It?s definitely Eagle worthy and it?s something I hope to do. It?s wonderful any other piece of history we can get in here. It makes Saugus a better community and it gives people a reason to stay.”Matt Tempesta can be reached at [email protected].