Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Two-dozen cars broken into in Garibaldi Provincial Park

Incident serves as precautionary reminder, former Parks employee says
img_6202
SMASH AND GRAB Broken glass is seen in a Rubble Creek parking lot where thieves have committed multiple break-ins in the last week. Photo submitted by Al Jenkins

A former B.C. Parks employee is warning the public about potential car break-ins after coming across almost two-dozen shattered windows in a campground parking lot.

"The first thing that attracted my attention was all this broken glass lying around," said Al Jenkins, of the Friends of Garibaldi Park Society.

Jenkins was going for a hike in the Black Tusk area on the morning of Monday, July 21 when he came across the shattered glass in the Rubble Creek parking lot.

"I walked around the entire two parking lots, and I counted up how many clusters of glass there were," Jenkins said.

"You could pretty well tell how many windows got broken."

Jenkins' final count was 20 piles of glass.

"This is pretty major, and I'm sure extremely inconvenient," he said.

These people would have been camped up at either Garibaldi Lake or Taylor Meadows, and they would have come down on Sunday and discovered the situation. Not good."

The Ministry of Environment, in an emailed statement, said that it received reports of 25 vehicles being broken into in the Rubble Creek parking lot on Sat., July 19.

The break-ins were reported to Whistler RCMP shortly after.

"Thieves may target locations where people leave their vehicles unattended for periods of time," the statement said.

"Be sure you remove all valuables from your vehicle prior to leaving it unattended, and leave unnecessary belongings at home."

Some might want to take it a step further, Jenkins said.

"Some people go so far as to say 'Don't leave any valuables and leave your windows down, leave your vehicle unlocked, so they won't break your window,'" he said.