SCRANTON -- It has been four days since thousands of campers packed up and left Montage Mountain for a music festival and some of the trash they left behind still littered the mountain. Montage is also trying to clean up its image.
Starting this past Thursday, 14,000 people filled Montage Mountain in Scranton for the weekend-long Camp Bisco music festival. Toyota Pavilion and Montage Mountain resorts are becoming a budding music festival venue, but Scranton had never experienced one quite this big.
Campers eventually filled several slopes on Montage Mountain.
Four days after the festival ended Saturday night, heaps of trash still linger. Brand new tents and grills were left behind. Dozens of workers have picked up trash each day this week and have only scratched the surface.
"Oh, there's going to be a cleanup effort on the slopes clear through this weekend. The priority effort that we place all of our people in was to get the park proper from the stairs all the way down through the wave pool, just everything that our customers see. That was our priority number one," said Charlie Jefferson, owner of Montage Mountain Water Park.
Jefferson said the ski resort and water park has taken a lot of heat from its regular customers, especially on the Internet.
On Monday, "Dave" wrote on wnep.com: "Montage Water Park should be ashamed they allowed this to happen to the water park. They opened it to the public yesterday and the water conditions were not safe what so ever."
A Facebook user posted: "I hope they drain all the water from the water park. Don't even want to imagine all the puke."
Jefferson said the state Department of Health was called in to check the water before the park reopened to the public and all tests came back clean. Jefferson said though they've taken a hit from local customers, inviting people in for music festivals is still a good thing.
"There's all these things that will bring people to the area and they will spend money, and I think if managed well they are all good for the area."
Montage plans to have the slopes clean by this weekend and then it's just three weeks until the next multi-day festival, the Peach Music Fest.