CAMP HOST REVIEW
My husband and I were camp hosts/handy hosts for Rock Bridge Memorial State Park from July 1st through August 22nd, 2023. This review will pertain directly to our experience working with park staff. If you want to know what the park and trails are like, there are plenty of other reviews and they are quite generous.
Unfortunately, we cannot in good conscience recommend RBMSP as a work camping opportunity for other workcampers. We have truly never seen a more poorly managed park, and the worst part of it was, many of the issues we identified were endemic to the Missouri State Parks division of the Department of Natural Resources. If I had been a MO state resident and seen the way the state 'manages' natural public resources with my taxpaying dollars, I'd be pretty unhappy, but I digress.
Without making this any longer than it needs to be, here are our two biggest issues:
The park superintendent, Ben Nagy allowed and turned a blind eye to an unhoused individual with a violent criminal record named Dominic essentially moving into the park and living out of his vehicle five to six days out of the week. Multiple park visitors, a couple of them elderly folks who came to walk their dogs, approached me and my husband while we were working to express concern and anxiety over him being there (one elderly lady told my husband that the man had "said ugly things" to her and that he scared her). We reported each and every interaction we had, but both Nagy and his supervisor, the deputy regional director, Melanie Robinson-Smith, along with what appeared to be the entirety of the Missouri Park Police system just shrugged and said there wasn't anything they could do. Right before we left, one of the young female staff confided in me that Dominic had begun showing up earlier and earlier (or had never left the park that night), right around the time she showed up, and that he had been parking his vehicle closer and closer to where she needed to access the office building each morning. She was the first to arrive and was usually alone for nearly an hour before anyone else showed up. When I asked her if she had told her supervisor, the park naturalist, Roxie Campbell, she said that Roxie had laughed at her and told her to deal with it. It concerned me so much that I called Nagy and told him about it. That young woman's hours were cut to almost nothing.
The park did not have adequate waste disposal infrastructure to deal with the wildlife, namely the dozens and dozens of raccoons. They had all learned to climb up into the dumpsters and to squeeze (or chew and squeeze) their way down into the containers. But once they got in, they could never get out. So unless park staff remembered and took the time to drive around to each dumpster, raccoons could stay trapped for days. There are more reasons than I can list here for why this is a major environmental and ethical issue. As soon as they were released, they came right back the next night. Additionally, they were very territorial about those dumpsters and would hiss and snarl at people. My husband had spent a lot of time down at the parking lot for the Devil's Ice Box, repainting the restrooms. One morning, a raccoon decided it wanted to get into the smaller can he was using to prop the bathroom door open. When he tried to shoo it away, it attacked him and bit his foot. Luckily, he was wearing steel-toed work boots. Imagine if he had been a child? This is a massive safety issue, and no one wanted to address it. I am assuming nothing has changed yet, but I sincerely hope I am wrong. There does not appear to be any proactive management or planning going into operations at the park to any extent. It is an embarrassment of what a park could be.
I wish that I could leave a more positive review. Some of the staff were genuinely good people who we became friends with. Unfortunately, none of them had the power to be the change they wanted to see in that park, and neither did we. If you are considering working here, please...
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