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Campground should be better monitored

Not dealing with loud party demonstrated 'a complete lack of respect for your customers'

Letter sent to Manning Park staff:

I am writing to express my disgust with the management of Manning Park campgrounds this past weekend. I was camped at a site in the Lightning Lakes loop on Friday and Saturday night – Sept. 12-13. We were a party of four. Across the way a wedding party had booked several sites and they were about 100 feet through the trees from our tents.

As you know, on Friday night the wedding party got loud and drunk with stereos cranked and car horns honking, well past the noise cut-off time of 10:30 p.m. On and on it went until at least 2 a.m.

We kept waiting for a park ranger to come in and shut them down – and evict them. They were that loud and they kept it up that long that eviction was to be expected.

Based on my experience in similar provincial campgrounds in Ontario, these people should have been evicted by midnight on Friday. If they were too drunk to leave, then your head ranger should have been parked at their sites at  7 a.m. the next morning to watch them pack up and escort them out of the park.

What happened?

Nothing.

Your staff had to know about this. And you had to know the wedding was to take place on Saturday and that another night of partying was only a few hours away. And Saturday night proved to be worse by a factor of three.

It’s hard to describe the noise and swearing that went on.

Where was Manning Park staff? Nowhere to be found. No park manager. No ranger. Nothing. No response.

We stopped the guy selling wood around 10 p.m. and asked him about shutting down the party. He said the night security would be around shortly and they would be quiet by 11 p.m. and shut down by 11:30 p.m.

What happened?

Nothing.

Seven hours of drunken garbage wafting through the trees like the stink of an outhouse.

Several times over the course of the night we heard other campers confront the partiers and demand they put a lid on it. These campers were shouted at and at one point I thought one of the other campers was going to get his head kicked in. It really was that ugly.

Why should someone coming to a provincial park with his family be forced into a potentially violent confrontation with a bunch of drunken people in the middle of the night?

What this demonstrates is a complete lack of respect for your customers. To allow this two nights in a row shows that you don’t care if people enjoy their stay or not. We paid $70 for the privilege of experiencing this level of service from your ranger staff that weekend.

Every camper with a site within 100 metres of the partiers should be contacted by your staff and given an apology, an explanation for your lack of response and a full refund.

This whole situation is especially frustrating seeing that the parks in this province are mine, too. Your management team has been contracted to take care of this park on behalf of everyone in B.C. And this is how you do it? To allow this to happen in a B.C. park in 2014 is a joke.

Gerry Giroux,

Vancouver