Normally, when you think of a trash cleanup, you often think of people along a highway in orange vests with those little grabbers and plastic bags, not diesel trucks and dirt bikes. But that is exactly what you get at the Gambler 500, an annual trash pickup event that features personalized beaters, camping, and music, on national forest land around Madras, Oregon, about 120 miles southeast of Portland.

The gimmick of the event, is to buy a junky car for $500 and then use that car to "race" on public lands to collect as much trash as possible. The cars are heavily modified and painted wild colors. One truck had a dragon on the hood that spits real flames. An old Toyota Corolla had a paint job reminiscent of Jackson Pollock.

It all started in 2014 when Morgan gathered a small group of friends to race junky old cars on dirt roads. As word got out and the event grew year after year, Morgan knew that the race format wasn’t sustainable.

“It had to change," Morgan said. "If we're gonna use public land, we changed the metric from competition from time, as a race would be, to see how much trash you could pick up off of public land.”

Tate sees this as a way to gamify community service.

“It's the Mary Poppins spoonful of sugar thing, you know? If you just said, ‘Hey, let's go pick up trash,’ you know, you would get a half a dozen people. But if you set up this big cool challenge where people could let their freak flag fly and build crazy weird cars and, and not be put in a box, then this is what happens,” Morgan said.

The event in Gambletown is a party in every sense of the word. RVs and tents dot the field. There are food vendors and minibike races. It is like Burning Man meets "Mad Max" meets the Sierra Club.

The organizers of the event provide potential routes for participants to drive and find as much trash as they can. When they get back to Gambletown, there is a line of a dozen dumpsters that each hold up to 40 cubic yards waiting for their bounties. Wooden pallets, broken office chairs, even a half smashed up RV are disposed of this way.

The Gambler 500 has spread beyond Oregon. Satellite groups, doing the same thing, have popped up from California to New York. Tate Morgan is happy to see his idea spread.

Over the weekend, the crew at Gambler 500 removed 13 cars, seven RVs, and four boats, along with about 600 tires and around 250,000 pounds of garbage. Since the event began, gamblers have removed more than 5 millions pounds of garbage from public lands, a testament to the group's slogan, "ABG" — always be gamblin'.