Unfortunately I've come across this a few times in different contexts.
The worst of the lot was in the N Cascades in Washington when I was in my early 20s.
A friend and I were going to hike in and spend a few days trying to climb a remote peak in the N Cascades. We wanted to get an early start from the trailhead so the plan was to drive to the trailhead, sleep in the back of the truck, and start hiking by headlamp after a few hours of sleep.
It was about 10pm when we were approaching the trailhead. To get to the small trailhead the road passes through a small camping area that is reservation only. Just before we got to the portion of the road that passes in front of the camp site, there was a rig sideways in the road blocking all travel. Confused, we walked up to the camp site and were confronted by an angry, extremely drunk group of dudes that read us the riot act about how people had been trying to pass through their camp site all night and that they had it reserved, etc. The trailhead was a few hundred yards beyond their camp site and several cars were already parked there.
We told them what our plan was and they refused to move the car and let us by to the parking area. We walked back to our truck and talked about plan B, which was to move back down the road out of eye and ear shot and sleep in the truck and then hike through once the drunk idiots were asleep. There were already a few other vehicles parked along the road that we had passed by on the way in. We didn't know it at the time, but they had also been chased off by the group of a-holes earlier in the night.
So we did that, moved a few hundred yards back down the road to a pullout and were trying to get settled into the truck to sleep for a bit when 4-5 dudes came walking down the road after us, put a flashlight in our faces and carried on screaming obscenities at us trying to run us out of the area. While trying to calmly explain our plan and that we had every right to be where we were at doing what we were doing, one of the d-bags tossed his rum and coke into my face while I was sitting on the tailgate of the truck, washing both of my contacts out and blinding me in the process.
I guess lucky for me they didn't start swinging because I was blind and a sitting duck.
It gets better.
After the drink toss, the larger group walked back to the camp site and some time later a vehicle left the camp site and drove off into the night. Not wanting to deal with this nonsense any longer, we drove out of the area and camped a few miles away, went in early by the camp full of sleeping, soon-to-be hungover campers, and had an awesome adventure in the mountains over the next 3 days. Albeit tainted by the very negative experience on the way in.
I don't exactly recall how it came together, but sometime in the week or two after this encounter, my friend and I connected with another group of climbers that had been accosted by this same group the same night. Turns out there were others as well. Apparently the rig that we saw leave their camp site drove out to call the NPS Rangers and reported that their group had been continually harassed by other people camping in the area. After we had left, a ranger showed up, well past midnight at this point, and wrote the others groups sleeping in their trucks that had bee chased away by the drunk camp tickets for creating a disturbance or some nonsense like that. WTF?!?
Fortunately I worked for a guide service that had permits to operate in N Cascades and I knew the Chief Ranger at the time well. I called her and laid out what actually happened and the tickets all got dropped.
This whole thing still bothers me to this day. I guess it was fortunate that this happened when I was fairly young. Had it happened more recently, things would have turned out very differently.
