LEWISTON — The kitchen sink found in the woods off the Park and Ride by I-95 raised an eyebrow. The abandoned beds, tires and couch were tame, if unexpected.

“What I chuckled at most: I found a toilet out there,” said Kurt Cedergren, 30 feet from a growing pile of trash at Marcotte Park where he’d brought his finds.

On Saturday, the Lewiston man and 20 others took part in Cache In Trash Out, an event organized by 16-year-old Boy Scout Jeremy Bernier, a cacher himself who’s going for his Eagle Scout rank.

People fanned out into woods around the Twin Cities, simultaneously using their global positioning system devices to uncover cache spots — frequently where someone has hidden a journal or memento — and pulling out furniture, tires and you-name-it along the way.

Bernier said he’d been inspired to lead the event after a peek at the woods behind Marden’s. That same spot was where most of the day’s old, dirty mattresses came from. People also found refrigerators and a stove behind the Main Street store.

Jim Leeman served as the day’s cache master. He helped with a map highlighting known trash spots around both cities. He didn’t wonder how a sink got in the woods, so much as why.

“There’s no need of it,” he said.

Leeman said lots of geocaching involves walking on public land and when access to that land is sometimes shut down, they frequently learn that people got too tired of litter being left behind. Events like CITO, happening all over the world since 2002, help counter that by showing that cachers respect the land, he said, and hopefully it encourages open access.

Phil Dehetre of Richmond had done similar events before but got his biggest load ever on Saturday by hitting River Road. When he pulled in to Marcotte Park, truck bed heaped over, Bernier and his friends pulled on blue rubber gloves and unloaded an old computer monitor, almost a dozen tires, a random, rusted 6-foot pipe and a green upholstered chair.

Dehetre and his son Justin, 12, and daughter Mikayla, 10, had been out for two hours.

“We had to leave two couches behind,” he said.

Bernier, a member of Troop 160 and a junior at Edward Little High School, said most participants made more than one run, bringing back tires, a cot frame, a carpet and even a laundry basket. Lewiston Public Works agreed in advance to haul off whatever the group collected.

At the end of the day, they picked up the equivalent of 230 bags of trash, more than he’d hoped, Bernier said.

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Boy Scout Jeremy Bernier, right, of Auburn helps unload a van of bulky trash at Marcotte Park in Lewiston on Saturday. Bernier, a Life Scout with Troop 160 of Lewiston, organized the “Twin City CITO” event to fulfill the requirements of the Eagle Scout Leadership/Service Project. Volunteers spread out and collected trash from Geocaching sites in Lewiston and Auburn. “Cache In Trash Out” is an ongoing environmental initiative supported by the geocaching community.

“I was not expecting this much at this point,” said Boy Scout Jeremy Bernier of the amount of garbage he and some volunteers had collected by noon Saturday — “maybe by the end of the day, but not now.”