Wednesday, August 15, 2007

Camping is Dead

Enough bubbly fun stuff. Enough sunsets, burping, farting, and funny pictures of my butt. It's time for some darkness and despair:

Camping is Dead

This is the type of camping that is dead: The family arrives at a campground, picks out a nice site, and sets up a modest tent. The kids run off to catch bullfrogs or swim in the pond with the other kids. After dinner (after Norman Rockwell leaves), they sit around the fire, talk quietly, listen to the crickets and the wind in the trees, and gaze at the stars.

That type of camping is dead because now, it's party time with as many of your toys as you can cram into your huge pickup truck and trailer. To illustrate, here's one campsite right near mine:

All of that stuff is for just two people!

There were a lot more sites just like that, but I didn't want to disturb the passed out revelers with my flash.

Now I'm not against party time, I'm just showing how effectively it kills off camping as I described it above. These parties go late into the night, and they're usually loud.

Noise

Sounds then: Wind in trees, crickets, happy kids.

Sounds now: Car alarms, generators, boom boxes, cell phone rings, Gameboy music, loud talking over the music.

Sometimes the temperature is a pleasant 75 degrees in the shade, but inside a big RV, it might be as hot as an old Volvo at the Ensenada Walmart. So, the RV owners run the generator so they can have the AC on. That's fine unless you are sitting in the shade at the campsite next door. Some RV generators sound like an idling cement truck.

I understand the attraction of RVing, and I have some good friends with RVs. I've even rented one. It's just that they are not always compatible with someone who wants to sit outside and read a book.

BTW, generators are no longer limited to RV's. I now see a lot of these at campsites:


Something new: a lot of cars have remote locks that briefly honk the horn when you lock the car. So, as you're going to sleep, you hear these little mini-honks around the campground.

Light

When the campers turn on their Coleman maxi-lights at night, the stars fade out until the sky looks like it does in Times Square. It's worse, actually, because in the city, people have their lights on inside their houses.

Last night I pitched my tent after dark, and I put it here...


...so that the car would block out the light from the neighboring site. But that was only partially effective, because the light streamed under car and onto the sides of the tent. In fact, I was triangulated by lights from three separate campsites.

Again, I realize the benefits of a bright light when cleaning up after the party. I'm just observing how it changes the camping experience.

Fire Rings

For some reason, and I'll bet that reason is "liability," the campgrounds seem to have fire rings with very high sides, like this one:

To give you a sense of scale, I've pasted in a picture of the Empire State Building.

This design might be great if the goal is nostalgia for being homeless and standing around an oil drum in a NYC slum, but for sitting around the fire it doesn't work well. Not if you want to actually see the fire. Plus, the cooking grate sits several feet above the bottom of the pit, so don't count on easy cooking.

Perhaps the main reason for this design is fire safety. But this advantage is gone due to fire-ring inflation. That is, the campers now bring tons of firewood, and fill up the entire ring with it, creating a mini-firestorm, with little fountains of embers shooting out the top.

Big Tents

Just a quick observation about those humongous, complicated three-or-more room tents that are popular today: I've observed that tent setting up time is not happy family time.

Backpacking

I've been talking about car camping here, of course. So you might be thinking that if you want to recreate the real camping experience, all you have to do is go backpacking. Yes, that's true in many cases, however:

1. Some Trinity Alps backpacking destinations prohibit firewood collection. That is, there are so many backpackers, that too much of the scrub manzanita is being used for firewood. So, no campfires.

2. At Mount Rainier National Park, there are so many hikers, that backpackers are required to put all of their waste, and I'm not talking about coffee grounds here, into bags and pack it out with them. You thought it was gross to pick up after your dog! Don't open the wrong stuff sack when looking for the trail mix.

WHO KILLED CAMPING?

I'm guessing that two reasons are overpopulation and consumerism.

In California, you can start making online reservations at 12 AM on January 1. By 4 AM, many of the better campgrounds are totally booked for every day in August. As population increases, we can keep building new Starbucks and strip malls, but the campgrounds are limited.

People apparently have to buy a lot of stuff. A campsite with a trailer, two motorcycles and an off-road vehicle is not unusual. How can this person resist buying a high power Coleman lantern?

In conclusion, it sounds like I'm condemning the change in camping atmosphere, but that's not true. I could get into having an RV with me, being able to take a nap in the hot afternoon even if my campsite had less shade than death valley. I enjoy hanging out with a bunch of friends and talking into the night. I'm just observing that car camping as it used to be is dead, and it's not coming back.

OK, enough darkness and despair -- back to farting and funny pictures of my butt.