This is the Colorado River.
On the other side is Arizona
people enjoying a peaceful,
leisurely holiday.
But for the next 15 miles up ri,
it's the West newest playground.
And it's sheer mayhem.
On a major holiday,
this stretch of the river attras
more than 100,000 fun seekers,
the equivalent of emptying Carl,
Coronado, Encinitas, Fallbrook, Lemon Grove,
Poway and Santee for three days.
They're people from all walks of life.
Most of them Californians from nearly
every city, just wanted to get y
from the hassles of everyday li.
But collectively,
in this tiny stretch of natural setting,
they often create a new the very
thing they sought to leave behi.
I brought you up here this week.
We always come up on the holiday weekends,
do some water skiing, some part.
Sounds like you're masochists in a way.
Baskets because of the crowds.
A little? Yeah, sometimes.
I think so too.
Has it gotten out of hand for
any of you at all?
No, not a lot. Just
can't ski during the middle of
the day or anything like that.
You know, you have to ski in
the mornings and ski at night.
It's just too crazy.
There's too many boats and stuft
here and those jet skis and tubs
and stuff just all in your way.
So you can't do anything.
There is virtually everything to do here.
Boating, water skiing, swimming,
camping, a little drinking.
Make that a lot of drinking.
With temperatures hovering at 1,
John Marks, who runs this general store,
sold 2000 cases of beer and 1500
cases of soda over the weekend,
10 to $11,000 in daily receipts.
Other shopkeepers did even bett,
but the money is a mixed blessi.
Marks calls this Memorial Day weekend
the worst he's seen in eight ye.
Daughterinlaw Erica concurs.
Pretty bad, because there's a l,
there's a lot of people.
You have to really lock
your doors and everything.
And the people up here,
they really don't care.
As you can tell from looking ar,
you know, they don't really care
what they do when they come up .
They get drunk and they get dopd
up and they're really rowdy
and they don't care, you know,
what kind of a mess they leave.
Law enforcement officers also breathe a
sigh of relief when the weekend is over.
Extra deputies were called
in to help control things,
but several deaths were reporte.
2IN1 boating mishap.
There were dozens of minor accidents.
Scores of people suffered cuts
from beer tabs and broken
glass and an occasional fight.
There were drug overdoses
and more than 100 arrests.
Well, they're just the people.
You can see the trash,
and it'll take six months to
clean this area up. Do you see
an end to this? No.
Every holiday, it'll be like
this from the rest of summer.
The question is, is it Was
it mad enough this weekend?
To keep you from coming back July 4th,
this is going to scare
them away. We'll be back.
The old timers come back forever. What's fun
to some clearly is insanity to others.
Jet boats, power boats,
skiers and jet skis roaring Pell
around and sometimes over people on rafts
in inner tubes and those just swimming.
It looked like a spider's web
being weaved without symmetry,
and the litter was staggering.
The cleanup likely will cost the state
hundreds of thousands of dollar.
By the time you see this,
residents of Parker will have begun cleaning
up Western America's newest playground.
They may already be finished,
but it'll be at least a month
before they recover mentally,
just in time for the July 4th
Crush Dave Cohen News 8 along te
Colorado River near Parker, AZ.