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Car Vandalized at Vernoony Kill Falls

Posted: Thu Sep 27, 2018 10:47 am
by dave
Hey folks, just wanted to make this incident known to my fellow outdoors people and see if it's a common occurence.

Last night, my friend and I drove up Trails End Road to the Vernooy Kill Falls trailhead and parked his car. We went a couple hundred yards up the trail to camp and for the most part things were quiet and peaceful.

At some point after dark, around 8pm, we could see and hear a truck pull into the area where we parked the car. It parked and for almost an hour we heard several voices, maybe teenagers, yelling and making various noises and slamming something metal occasionally. We had no idea what they were doing and assumed they might be going up the trail or idk. They eventually left though.

When my friend and I returned to his car, we found it completely engulfed in mud. In the grill, on the handles, on every window, and stuffed inside the gas compartment with thick mud. Fortunately it wasn't directly stuffed into the gas tank.

Our reaction went from thinking there were weird shadows on the car, to recognizing the mud, to thinking the people were mudding in their truck and just splashed our car, to realizing our car was deliberately targeted. There was evidence they threw mud balls, rocks, and slathered it in. They even left a message on the drivers window, "sorry"

It took awhile to grab water from stream and try scraping off enough mud from the windows that we could drive out of there. We recognize this was some kind of prank, but it seems totally uncalled for and taken pretty far, but thankfully no permanent damage was done. Has this happened to others here? Are there precautions that we could take to prevent this kind of thing? I'd thought about approaching them when I first heard them, but even if I had and caught them in the act, I'm not sure I could do anything that wouldn't backfire.

There are reports that the issue was reported to the Police and DEC. A trail cam was placed at the site in case they return to damage other cars.

This incident is also reported on the Catskill Mountaineer Facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1062333 ... page_panel

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