It’s Memorial Day weekend and Spring Lake Park officially opens with new improvements.

Greene County Conservation Director Dan Towers says they’ve changed how camping registrations work at the park.  Campers can now self-register for a campsite and don’t have to have the park ranger register them anymore.  Towers says the new system it will be more convenient for everyone.

“Almost every other park in the state has a self-registration system and it was just time that we decided to go to this too.  Hopefully it’ll save time for the park ranger (and) make it more convenient for the camper and kind of a win-win situation.”

Another improvement to the park is installing rock parking pads at several campsites.  Towers notes that 80 of the 120 campsites that have electrical hookups now have rock pads for camping units to park on.  He adds that by providing rock pads, it should eliminate problems that they had in the past.

“If the camper parked cross ways to close to the road, then there’s no place to park their cars.  So they would park on the road and that would become congested and become a safety concern if you needed emergency vehicles down there.  Another one, some of them would park over their lot lines and onto the next lot line.  This should eliminate both of those issues.”

The rock pad project is estimated to cost $25,000 from the Conversation Department’s camping revenue fund.