Campers generally well behaved on long weekend
Posted May 19, 2015 1:53 pm.
This article is more than 5 years old.
It has been a long weekend tradition, of sorts, in Alberta.
After almost every May long weekend, there are reports of people leaving piles of garbage at makeshift campsites, even abandoned furniture, and tearing up the wilderness with their off-road vehicles.
So far this year, though, Alberta Parks tells 660News, they’ve received no word of any major problems.
“We’re hoping out messaging around respecting the land and the natural areas to open the May long weekend got through to Albertans,” said Tim Chamberlain. “We have not received any major incident reports.”
Chamberlain says the North Buck Lake recreation area, north of Edmonton, was temporarily evacuated, because of a wildfire burning nearby. But, overall the number of human-caused and unattended campfires was down significantly from a typical long weekend.
“Of the fires that were reported, 50 were unattended campfires,” said Duncan MacDonnell with Sustainable Resource Development. “Most of those were in the south part of the province and that sounds like a lot, but it’s actually down from what we normally get on a long weekend. We could get 100 to 200 unattended campfires and this year there were only 50. That’s still 50 too many, but it’s a little better than it was before.”
He warns, with hot weather in the forecast, the fire danger could rise, and it’s already at high to extreme in some parts of Alberta.
