Wednesday 20 January 2016

Curfew at Cypress Lake Campground Bruce Peninsula National Park

So, it's been a year since I have been blogging.  I have been meaning to get back to it, and apparently now is the time, since unfortunately I'm pissed off.  You see, today,, yurts went up for reservation at Cypress Lake campground in Bruce Peninsula National Park, managed by Parks Canada.  That's all cool and I was excited to reserve a yurt for the May 24/Victoria Day long weekend....  until I read some notes about restrictions while I was going through the motions of reserving a yurt.  On top of the usual pervasive alcohol ban, now there are campfire bans...   you are not allowed to have a campfire after 10pm until 7am.  Talk about absurd.   I was infuriated and abandoned my effort to reserve a yurt for this weekend.






  A huge portion of why people go camping is to enjoy a campfire late at night.  A group of people respectfully gathering around a campfire quietly does in no way take away from someone else's camping experience.  Forcing everyone to shut down and go to bed at 10pm certainly takes away from many people's camping experience.  You know there are quite a few people that don't want to go to bed at 9 or 10 pm like 70 year olds and people with small kids do.   The existing noise rules are more than sufficient to ensure a good camping experience to all, provided the rules are enforced by the rangers.  Treating people like children and creating what essentially is a curfew is an asinine way to address the problem of people being rowdy and partying all night long.
I wrote a complaint on the Parks Canada comment area complaining about this, and I received this response:

This essentially says that they are lazy and want to take away any possible potential situations that
people might get rowdy and have some fun.  That's like telling everyone in society they cannot drive cars anywhere anymore more because doing so gets some people killed occasionally.
I myself don't like children screaming at 7 or 8 am either.  I propose children are banned for campgrounds as well.
One way to ensure noone gets out of hand at all and doesn't offend anyone at any time is perhaps just to shut the entire campground down period...  maybe that's the next logical step.

Way to go Parks Canada for taking all of the fun out of camping and being complete idiots.  SMH.

I do encourage you to write some comments to Parks Canada regarding this here:
https://reservation.pc.gc.ca/Comments.aspx