Bass Harbor Campground — Hotel in Tremont

October 1, 2021 141 Dover Lane Madison, MS 39110||||TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN: Public health hazard Bass Harbor Campground.||I’m writing this communication to express my displeasure with a recent camping experience I had at the Bass Harbor Campground, 342 Harbor Drive, Bass Harbor, ME 04653.||||A group of us numbering about 16 traveled from Louisiana and Mississippi to enjoy camping and sightseeing in and near Acadia National Park. Our group has been visiting a National Park on a yearly basis for the past fifteen years, base camping and enjoying both the geography and communities our trips offer. ||||WHAT A DISAPPOINTMENT WITH BASS HARBOR CAMPGROUND.||||Our group had selected a number of tent campsites to stay for the week of September 12-18, 2021. Restroom and shower facilities were available for the tent campers. Things were fine until the toilets started backing up and became unusable. Complaints were made to the camp manager, name unknown. Corrections were made, but sewage problems kept reoccurring. Finally, on September 16, 2021 there occurred what I can only describe as a “confrontation” between a number of our group (4) and the same camp manager. He said we had to stop flushing so much toilet paper down the commodes because we were stopping up the drains. We asked what he meant by “too much toilet paper” and he replied we were causing problems, stopping up the drains and he had to, and I quote, “clean all the sh*t out” of the system. I asked him if he was telling all the other campers that and he replied that our group was the problem and that there was only one other camper there even though many other campers were in and out all week. You should know that “our group” is composed of individuals who have worked on conservation and environmental issues all our lives. We respect the environment and enhance areas we visit and leave sites better than we found them. ||||We had to use the facilities across the road used by the trailer and RV campers. The camp manager did not give us the combination to the entrance door and we had to get it from other campers in the area. ||There are 24 tent campsites in the tent camping area. The restroom shower facility was apparently not capable of handling 17 or 18 campers. This constitutes a public health hazard and official attention must be directed to it to insure the health of unsuspecting patrons. ||||Needless to say, what should have been an enjoyable vacation camping experience was damaged by our experience at Bass Harbor Campground. I am telling anyone who asks about my vacation to avoid Bass Harbor Campground at all costs.||||I implore you do what you can to correct an abominable public health problem and save the reputation of the Acadia tourist community.||Yours truly,||||E. Avery Rollins, J.D. ||averyrollins@aol.com 141 Dover Lane ...

Bass Harbor Campground had the potential to be such a wonderful place, but on numerous occasions, management has proven to be extremely unprofessional. Let me start by saying that ANYONE can come to this campground and shower, as long as they pay a $3 fee. They do not have to register with the campground; they simply walk onto the property, put $3 into a box and walk right into the bath house.

Cut to yesterday: I was showering in one of the campground bath houses, and I heard the woman in the stall next to me yell that there was someone filming her with their cellphone. We caught the young man and brought him to management at the campground. What did they do with him? They let the kid ride off into the sunset without taking any of his information. When the owner of the campground was asked if he was going to do anything about it, he was sarcastic and defensive and clearly had no regard for the victim or the safety of the rest of his paying campers.

Meanwhile, the previous two nights, I could hear a management person harassing a man, his wife, and child for paying only $1.50 for their showers. Management was understandably annoyed that these people did not pay the fair share for their showers; however, the management person continued to yell at the man for approximately 10 minutes, calling him a liar and a thief and saying he wished he had a camera to take pictures of the family to post on the bath house walls... I guess as a shaming tactic...? Kind of strange. The next day, again, I heard this management person telling random campers the story, which I found to be super unprofessional. I also heard him harassing people, aggressively asking if they were visitors and if they had paid their showering fees. Keep in mind, my campsite is about 40 ft away from the bath house and I could hear each one of these conversations taking place.

Anyways, it is clear the owner and his staff care more about receiving $3 for showers than prosecuting perverts. They placed a security camera outside the bath house facing the money box for the showers; yet when asked to handle a perverted trespasser, they did nothing.. did not look at the security footage, did not contact the police, nothing. SHAME ON YOU, BASS...

Our group camped for nearly a week in "section C" which is the tent only area across the highway from the main campgrounds. Section C although presented as a campgrounds is not. It does have a shower house with showers and toilets. The area really is a grove of trees around an open space the size of several tennis courts. Tent sites have no boundaries only numbered signs tacked onto trees. Each camper has to decide where the site is located. There are no tent pads but even worse there was not a square foot that was level or free of exposed roots. Our campers had to position their tents on grassy slopes or underneath trees on very lumpy ground.||||However this low rating is not due to this mislabeled campgrounds but is due to the manager of Bass Harbor Campgrounds. First he was unresponsive for weeks to emails and phone calls about reservations in September. Once we were set up, he complained about my changing of sites although that took only a few clicks by his office staff. (We had been assigned to damp shady sites but I changed them to sunny and higher sites.). He refused to provide a table for our improvised kitchen. But worse of all was his lack of maintenance of the toilets in the shower house. On Thursday, several toilets clogged up. He closed the shower house with signs but did not provide the four digit code for the main shower house. We had to ask other campers. On Friday morning, the toilets clogged up again and one overflowed. The manager then confronted four of us saying that the problems were due to "we were using too much toilet paper". He then threatened to close the facility - and to bill us for the service call of a sewer company. ||||The ranking of this manager and his business is as low as possible due to his actions. In my decades of organizing outdoor events all over USA and Canada, I cannot recall dealing with anyone who was so offensive. He lacked any professionalism normally found in business men and women who provide goods and services to the public. I would urge everyone to avoid during any business with Bass Harbor...