They started around three summers ago. There were the bustling summer parties on the cul de sac at Kitchens Lane, which serves as an entrance to the 2,000-acre Wissahickon Valley Park. And past the picnic tables and parking spaces, there are walking paths leading to Monastery Stables and the Kitchens Lane “dog beach” at Wissahickon Creek.

On the morning after, Brian Flanagan — a software developer who rents a tenant house on the Monastery Stables property — walks out of his front door facing the cul de sac to pick up the trash left behind. Beer bottles. Bota Box wine containers. Portable grills. Every morning, there’s a diverse array of discarded items as he walks his dogs. Visitors leave bags of them at the base of the garbage cans, next to the porta potties and by the water. On occasion, Flanagan finds drug paraphernalia and diapers. The most common sighting is the neighbors and visitors cleaning up the aftermath with him.

As the leaves turn and the outdoor gatherings in Wissahickon Park decline, Flanagan worries about experiencing it all over again next summer.

“We’re still finding trash from the summer as leaves reveal it,” he said in early October.

Nearly 2,000 people have signed a Change.org petition as of Oct. 6, calling on park rangers and law enforcement to “stop unlawful swim parties, dangerous behavior, and massive trash dumping in the Wissahickon Creek.”

Areas along the creek, especially Devil’s Pool, have long served as hubs for illegal park activities: swimming, underage drinking and barbecuing, as people seek reprieve from the summer heat in the water and under the shade. But the petition’s creator, Jennifer Cass, says the parties have made it difficult for other visitors like her to enjoy the Wissahickon over the past several years. People ignore the no swimming and littering signs and mark the rocks with spray paint. The longtime Roxborough resident visits the park several times a month. But she took a break this summer due to the amount of radios at Devil’s Pool.

“The Wissahickon’s meant to be quiet. If you go there, you want to hike, you want to see nature, you want to enjoy your day, and it’s hard to do it when it’s treated like an amusement park,” she told the Local.

Kristin Graettinger, a Germantown resident, said she stopped hiking the Orange Trail in the summer months after seeing “large dumpsters worth of trash” piled up along the water a few years ago.

Concerns over neglect of the park are nothing new. Devil’s Pool started experiencing recreational overuse in 1965, Philadelphia Magazine reported. The Philadelphia Inquirer in 2019 wrote about buses bringing crowds of people to the swimming hole from out of state. But the level of activity, Cass said, is “out of control” compared to her childhood, when the park was relatively quiet apart from the occasional swimmer sighting. And she’s noticed a “drastic difference” within the last 10 years.

“I’m pretty sure the residents, not just in Roxborough [but in] Manayunk, Chestnut Hill and other areas, are fed up. It’s just, I lost my patience quicker than everybody else,” she said.

From 2011 to 2021, the number of estimated annual visitors increased from one million to 2.6 million, according to Friends of the Wissahickon (FOW). This is due to a range of factors, including social media. The organization has volunteer crews that regularly pick up trash in the park.

Cass believes more park rangers and police presence would be the most effective solution, as they can issue citations and fines. Officials cracked down on Devil’s Pool toward the end of the summer during the COVID-19 lockdown. But the crowds returned the following year, she said.

“I want this to be a permanent end. I want the city to take the initiative so that there is consistent enforcement going forward,” she said.

Cass emphasized that the goal of the petition is to prevent people from degrading the park, not keep anyone out or make anyone feel unwelcome.

“It’s about us forfeiting our rights that are within the park rules to enjoy nature as is, in order for somebody else to be in violation of park rules and continue on with these parties,” she said.

It’s also a safety issue, she argued. The barbecues can cause accidental wildfires and people have drowned in the creek, including one man who died after being pulled from Devil’s Pool in April.

Cass’s petition caught the attention of city officials in late August. Park rangers and police officers from the 14th and 5th districts patrolled Devil’s Pool on the weekends. Sue Buck, director of operations for Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, told the Local on Aug. 28 that officers monitored the trailhead that leads to the pool on Valley Green Road and Livezey Lane, parts of Forbidden Drive and the parking lots near Valley Green Inn, Livezey Lane and Kitchens Lane. The enforcement was effective in reducing littering, noise and swimming, Cass and FOW confirmed.

Parks & Recreation officials plan to enact the same level of enforcement every weekend next summer and add signs outlining park rules, Buck told the Local in September.

“I’m just looking forward to making the same progress that we did toward the end of the summer, getting an earlier jump on it to ensure that we can continue with our action plan,” Buck said.

FOW installed some Leave-No-Trace-themed signs in the Devil’s Pool area last summer and this year, the weekly cleanup volunteers have noticed significantly less trash. The total amount of trash in the Wissahickon has declined from 39,000 pounds in 2022 to around 30,000 in 2025, said Shawn Green, director of field stewardship for FOW.

“I do think that we are being joined more and more by people who understand just that sentiment that caring for loving a place means taking care of it, and so we just need to keep spreading that message,” said Sara Stevenson, FOW’s executive director.

After hours

The Wissahickon is a popular summer party spot for kids as young as 13 years old, with the biggest influxes taking place from the last day of school to July 4 and from late August to Labor Day, said Lt. Jonah Conway and Captain James Kimrey of the 5th Police District. The officers often receive calls from residents about kids hollering and speeding up and down their neighborhoods.

Underage drinking at the park has been around for decades, they said. But the groups of partiers have drastically grown with the use of cell phones. The teens organize gatherings in private group chats, drawing students from as far as Lancaster and Lansdale.

“Instead of it being a small group of people from one area or one school, you get people from all over,” Kimrey said.

Conway and Kimrey said some of these kids get dropped off by their parents or Ubers.

Enforcement is difficult because the teens scatter into the woods at the sight of an officer. Unless there’s music blasting, the department is hesitant to send an officer into the park to break up a gathering.

“Take it from a safety standpoint. You’re asking a cop who’s unfamiliar with the terrain to go into the pitch black woods to potentially go in and look for kids, or chase them out,” Conway said. The officers risk falling and getting injured, Kimrey said.

The 5th District pays overtime to officers and posts a dirt-bike detail, which is in charge of recovering illegal dirt bikes and off-road vehicles, at Bells Mill and Wises Mill roads during the summer. Officers also cover the entrance at Henry Avenue.

Underage drinking tends to be a low priority for police officers in areas with violent crime, Kimrey said. And the neighborhoods around Wissahickon have lower violent crime rates than most of Philadelphia. But the 14th District, which covers the right side of the Wissahickon, tends to have more violent incidents at the opposite end of the district from the park.

And the police department is understaffed. Officials say it is 20 percent short of its full contingent of officers, as of spring 2025.

“I would like to do more, but in order to block [our] six entrances [to the park], I won’t have anyone left,” Kimrey said.

More rangers

Flanagan, who’s been visiting the park for 25 years, said that more enforcement in one area will drive visitors to another spot that’s less regulated. He believes the crackdown at Devil’s Pool and social media caused the parties at Kitchens Lane. The most effective solution would be more park rangers, he said.

Parks & Recreation, which protects more than 10,000 acres of public land, has 18 full-time and 14 seasonal rangers for the entire city. Four to six of them work at the Wissahickon, depending on the weekend, Buck said. She’d like to hire more rangers.

Another obstacle with enforcement is that park users claim they don’t have their ID on them and that often prevents rangers from writing citations, Buck said.

Philadelphia’s parks are underfunded compared to other cities, according to the Trust for Public Land (TPL). The non-profit ranks the 100 most populous cities on its park score, which is a combination of access and spending on parks. Philadelphia ranks No. 27 and that’s mainly driven by its strong access to parks, said Kari Sannino, the Pennsylvania program director for TPL. On the other hand, the city is in the bottom quarter in terms of investment, which accounts for both public and private investment. Philadelphians spend $120 per resident on parks, below the national average of $154.

“There just is not enough spending on parks in Philadelphia to keep up with the incredible amenities that we have,” she said.

Philadelphia’s investment ranking has improved amid Mayor Cherelle Parker’s “Rebuild” capital investment program, but that doesn’t assist with staffing, including rangers.

“It’s a city priority issue, and it’s a quality of life thing. And I think that we’ve got to do more than the minimum to make the city what it can be,” said Kitchens Lane resident Walt Crimm.

Crimm, Flanagan and other Kitchens Lane neighbors met with city officials in February to discuss solutions for the summer ruckus. The meeting included representatives for Councilmember Curtis Jones, the Parking Authority, Parks & Recreation, Friends of the Wissahickon and the 14th Police District. One positive result was the work of the park rangers, Crimm said.

Rangers parked at the Kitchens Lane entrance toward the end of the summer and that made a “big difference” in preventing people from bringing illegal items into the park, Flanagan said.

Another option is for the city to open more pools to prevent illegal swimming, especially as the climate warms and people will be in more need of extreme heat relief, Stevenson said. Philadelphia has around 70 free outdoor pools.

People who want to barbecue can cook at pavilions and picnic areas with fireplaces, city grills and barbecue stands, such as Blue Bell Park Pavilion and FDR Park, Cass said.

The parties may be drawing to a close, but she plans to visit the park every week and post updates on her petition.

“I’m not going to let this issue drop,” Cass said.