All the Other Camping Trips at Once

Title Photo – Bradley and Cooper trying to figure out where the hell we are besides “somewhere in Yosemite”. From probably 2017?

Grumble grumble “This is too damn cold” grumble grumble . I muttered to myself as I tried to get breakfast to cook on the campstove in front of me. If you’ve ever gone camping in Yosemite in October or later you’ll know it’s uncomfortably cold. And before anyone starts yelling at me I did live in Michigan for 4 years, so I have some idea what cold is. Even if Phoenix AZ certainly doesn’t.

My grumbling though was interrupted by a poke from a nervous 6th grader to my left. “What’s up?” was the quick response, for some horrid reason I was the scout in charge of this trip. I think Cooper, who was the scout in charge of all the kids, was out sick so I’d been promoted to keeping the kids together as I was the 2nd in command at that point.

“Hey Sam what should we do about the bear behind us?” as he casually pointed towards a black bear smelling our breakfasts and sitting in the middle of our campsite.

On the list of sentences you don’t wish to hear, it’s somewhere up there with “it’s malignant”, “We’re losing cabin pressure”, and “Germany’s far-right part is winning elections”. Especially when it’s 7:30 am, it’s freezing cold, and I don’t have a coffee.¹

Well at least I don’t need a coffee anymore as I whip my head around and there is an honest-to-god black bear sampling the local smells wafting up from various stoves. There are probably 30 boy scouts and 6 parents scattered through this group: Each clumped around a stove waiting for food. And not a single one besides this 6th grader on one of their first camping trips has noticed the bear hanging out with us. (At least I wasn’t the only oblivious one).

I screamed “BEAR”, people turned around and we all did the tried and true tactic of black bears: Scream loudly and hope you scare the creature away.² It got the hint and wandered off back into the woods. And then I’m pretty sure an adult yelled at us for being too loud and to finish up breakfast because we were already late (somehow always being late is a staple of scouts).

Ok I will be frank here, I was heavily involved in boy scouts for at least 5 years and in that time went on dozens of trips. And we had a habit of trips going off the rails as everything went wrong. I also went on a backpacking trip with friends at the end of high school and camped with a few different groups over the years. It is simply not possible for me to sum up all the stories over the years. So my goal for this is to focus on lessons learned in arguably amusing fashions and how we got to that point.

The bigger trips I’ve already written up independently: Smoky mountains, Yosemite backpacking.)

Check the Damn Logistics

When I was a senior in High School, my friend Anna ³wanted to host a backpacking trip for reasons untold. And I was asked if I wanted to go on it. Which, of course, yes, what else was I doing at that time except trying to cross off side quests (relationship, party, friends, etc).

I had backpacked extensively by this point, and she far more so. She used to do month-long canoe trips in the middle of nowhere MN. That actually sounded miserable, but besides the point. At least from one of these trips I got the good photo of her dropping a machete on herself. (I checked my old photo albums and it’s lost to time unless I ask her oops⁴).

But either way, there were three others joining us on this trip Niki and Ben had both backpacked as well, Avni, our 5th member, was the ONLY person who had not backpacked before. And guess who we put in charge of packing food… Yeah I can’t even blame her that one is on us.

Low and behold we get to day 2 of the 3 day trip and we’re realizing that we’re more or less out of food. We have enough for one more meal and breakfast or so but otherwise we are pretty toast. 

Anna checked the map, and if we made decent time, we could get back to civilization in a single day so it wouldn’t be an issue. Alas, we had to cut one day off of our trip but we didn’t run out of food. It was a dumb as shit mistake for us to make but here we are.

Now I always go with everyone who packs their own food at the very least. Allows for more versatility with how much people eat, plus people can bring desserts or luxuries that would be cut from group meals. I understand this isn’t reasonable for long trips, but for the short length ones I do it does work out well for us. Also, I’m a vegetarian, and no one is really ever interested in sharing meals with me. Don’t worry, it’s mutual.

Choose your Camping Friends Closely

Not saying this like you need to go camping with only people you’re close with. I’m a firm believer that camping is how you get closer with people to begin with, and for that to be accomplished, you have to well… not be close with them to start. Deep thoughts with Sam I know

Yet hear me out, pick who you sleep in the same tent as closely. If you pick it badly, you’ll be like one of the scouts under me who bunked with a kid who got homesick. These scouts were on their first-ever camping trip with the troop so they chose another newbie (new scout). The complaining is bad enough, but turns out the kid pukes when nervous, and they were. In the tent. Where three other people are trying to sleep.

There’s a lot of “Keep a stiff upper lip” moments in camping, but I was visibly convinced wincing that morning when the kids were asking if we kept backup sleeping bags or a change of clothes they could have. No one really carries extra sleeping bags with them, but between twenty scouts, we scrounged enough clothes to give every kid hit by the projectile a change of clothes. Good on them, however, that they didn’t leave after that event, honestly.

For the bright side, I will say the best moments of camping come from conversations in the tents after the fire is done with whoever you are sharing a tent with. These aren’t really guaranteed on a given trip. Often, people just kinda shrug and go to bed. Not like anyone stays up late while camping. But if they do stay awake for an hour and you’re both in sleeping bags, you can learn a lot about a person.

Or there was the time a raccoon broke into the tent, and my scouting friend pulled out a raccoon and hit it until it ran out of the hole it had chewed through the tent. I, in my infinite survival skills, was fast asleep the entire time and only noticed the next morning when a daft breeze was coming through the tent and I thought to inquire why there was a small mammal-sized hole in the side of our tent.

The dichotomy of camping eh?

It will Rain and there’s Nothing you can Do

I don’t believe in God. Or a higher power. Far as I can tell, it’s all chaos out there. But I do believe in not questioning these things out loud. Best to play the odds on this sort of cosmic intervention situation.

Therefore, if you are ever presented with a clear and warm Saturday afternoon, never say ANYTHING along the lines of “Wo,w this weather is great, I’m sure it’ll hold”. God forbid if you saw rain on the weather report earlier and then say, “Oh, yay, it looks like it won’t be raining tonight”. That’d be like seeing Poseidon reach down to you, extend his hand in greeting, and then you spit in his mouth.

You know where this story is going, but I was camping with my high school robotics team and one of my teammates had just loudly announced that the weather wasn’t going to get bad. Less than 2 hours later, the rainfall started. And it didn’t let up.

Rain in a tent has a certain level of peace to it. It’s a very peaceful feeling as you hear the pitter around you, the lantern is the only steady light and everyone is talking in the shadows of the tent. That peace holds up if the tent is good quality and you put your tent in a good spot.

We did not, but honestly, it wouldn’t have mattered because the tent was on marshy ground and we had no way to elevate it. So water started to leak in and approach the sleeping bags quickly. At this point, there was nothing to do but complain and go to sleep. Needless to say, waking up with the tent bottom wet and cold, if you could even sleep, is not what I’d recommend if trying to convince your friends to go spend a weekend in the woods.

And at the end of the day, this was far from the only occurrence of rainfall while camping. I also had trips where it was just flat out freezing. When the temperature is 32 outside and you aren’t snow camping or heating a tent, it just won’t be a pleasant experience. The best part of these trips are the mornings when you leave. There are actions you can take to mitigate it, and they will make a tangible difference. But some stage of the process: Sleeping, cooking, or packing up, will become miserable. And yes yes type 2 fun but I did crew it’s not always fun.

You just get used to complaining through it. And it makes the better stories. For the next 4 months of the robotics year, we got to complain about the time we all froze to death camping in the woods. Misery really brings folks together in that regard. Way better than any team bonding activity

The Drive is the (Second? Third?) Best Part

Before I’m convicted of a crime for this statement, hear me out. Because I know it’s a dumb statement to say that “The best part of camping and getting away from technology is the part where you get technology”.

I acknowledge that the drive becomes the best part because of the trip. Otherwise, running errands would be equally fun. But being filthy and stuck in a car with your friends with the vision of a shower in your future is one of the most fun feelings. Plus, you’re all exhausted even though you did basically nothing while camping (or did a lot while backpacking).

For the Yosemite trip, I wrote up [Here]. We yelled the entire Legally Blonde for the drive back. In Scouts, when at Yosemite, you drove back during the day and were able to actually see the valley in its full glory. This is the part of the trip where people share photos with each other that they took. You eat junk food you buy on the way back.

(The breakfast/lunch/coffee you get on the way back is also part of this highlight).

Camping is painfully Boring

If I were curmudgeonly or not a proud member of Gen-Z, here is where you discuss the lack of attention span of the modern-day human, and how we spend too much time on devices. I mean yeah, probably I won’t really argue that.

But the point being that when you’re camping, we would get bored and try and pass the time. The most common is card games.

With folks I met in Phoenix, we play Blackjack. With college friends, we played Euchre, a trick-based 4-player game that is one of those staples of the Midwest. For the second class in the introductory sequence for computer science at Michigan, you were required to code Euchre just because they assume everyone knows the rules.

But in scouts, we played a game called Deuces or Ratslap. One a somewhat simplified Trick game where you have two teams of two, and the other a free-for-all all game where it’s more based on reaction time than any modicum of strategy. The former was a way for you to gain prestige in the group for being skilled at Deuces. 

But the latter had a special rule. Basically, if you don’t know Ratslap (Egyptian rat screw is the other name for it), you keep playing until one person has the entire deck of cards, at which point they win. If you run out of cards, you are out of the game unless you can gain cards back by slapping the deck in the middle of the group before anyone else in certain scenarios.

Our house rule, however, was that if you were out of cards and you still slapped the deck you lost a hand⁵. If you did it twice, you had to use your elbows. And somewhat amusingly if you still screwed up twice more you had to use your face.

Lo and behold, my friend is out of cards, has fumbled four times in a row, and the best possible combination in the game comes up next (2 jacks in a row if anyone cares). Without a moment’s hesitation, there’s a bang, and the entire picnic table jumps as they slam their skull into the middle of the table before anyone can get their hand on the deck. Which brought them back into the game and maybe gave them a mild concussion. At least they weren’t looking at any screens that night, if they did have one?

Be Careful Who You Drink With

Camping and ranked competitive alcoholism. A match made in heaven, honestly. Please see the point above about unmitigated boredom plus a lack of rules. Camping is the only thing that even approaches the midwestern noon-game tailgate of my college years.

(Nothing like having your roommate brew coffee and open a White Claw with you at 7 am. It’s 32 degrees outside. And the city is about to be DRUNK.)

It’s even true for company camping trips. For better (and probably more likely) for worse

Whatever Higher Power there is has a sense of Humor

I grew up not being good at sports. I’m a fine enough runner, all things considered, but not actually good on a realistic level. There’s a difference between a 20-minute 3-mile and a 15 minute one, I can reach that first goalpost. Just not the second

But as I managed to hit my 4th clay pigeon in a row and the dozen or so folks behind me were hooping and hollering, I was quite shocked myself. I had never before in my life used a 20-gauge shotgun, and I was a half-decent shot.

So, a fun quirk of Boy Scouts is that there are 135 merit badges as of writing this, and you need at least 21 to get Eagle. Of those 21, 14 are specifically required or part of a selection (Ex. you need hiking OR swimming OR backpacking). While I suppose it’s to be expected, the difficulty of these badges varies widely. Certain ones, like astronomy, you can get in a night if you fill out some worksheets and look at constellations, whereas Scuba diving literally requires you to get a PADI license (the international scuba license allowing dives up to 40 ft down) which, as you can imagine, is significantly more in-depth⁶.

For whatever reason, shotgun shooting is one of the hardest ones. You have to hit 13 of 25 pigeons, which, if you’ve ever tried it before, is an absurd ask for middle and high schoolers who do not shoot on the regular. Of the dozen who attempted it, only three of us got it, and I got frankly lucky. I think I got my 13th on the 24th shot or something. Still I was happy with it, I wasn’t even going for the badge when I started. My shoulder hurt like hell though, I was somehow even scrawnier than I am now in the 8th grade.

If you’re wondering the other two people got it much more convincingly than me. John Roos, one of my friends in K-12, missed the first three shots then paused to adjust hit sight before nailing the 4th pigeon. Then he hit the next 12 in a row without flinching. Sure he was using a 12-gauge (more scatter = better odds), but that was actual skill. He went to Texas A&M, currently doing special forces selection, and honestly makes much more sense that he has skill at it.

Afterwards we all ate barbeque. Which I chuckle at looking back as a vegetarian that I spent a day in middle school shooting shotguns and eating barbeque. And somehow I’m alright at shooting guns. Curse you whoever gave me the talent for that sport. Not like I’m going hunting anytime soon.

It’s Literally as Stressful as you want it to be.

Maybe this is just how I see things, because I’m just tired and backed up planning crap all the time, but camping really isn’t that stressful. You book a site for $50 and then go drinking and play cards in the woods for 2 days.

Run out of firewood? Drive 2 minutes and buy more. Run out of booze? Drive 5 minutes and buy more (or rather send the most sober person). Sleeping bag sucks? Sleep in your car.

Yet one of the most amusing things whenever I camp is people acting like it’s a feat of nature that we’re doing ok. A lot of “Other people couldn’t do this” and “We’re experts, this takes experience.” It’s even worse with former scouts. As an Eagle scout, I have to restrain myself from rolling my eyes if someone uses that as a claim of competence. I learned many genuinely helpful things in Scouts. But that was how to email and do convincing paperwork, not exactly surviving in the woods. Calm down team, we’re in our 20’s and half of us are probably paying too much money for our gear.

Idk I’m being cynical and will probably go have another drunk cig ten feet away from the campfire as my friends put me in timeout for being bitchy..

In a more unhinged positive side of things, once you realize there aren’t any rules it becomes a ton of fun. I was in 6th grade and hiking in Yosemite with my troop. And we ran into a small dam from the lower side. On the dam side was a pretty stream to follow and rocks. Course there was the actual trail but this looked more. The high schoolers huddled up and mulled it over for oh give or take 30 seconds before Joey the leader of the our scout group confidently declaring for us to line up as they hoisted over the wall. Because why not at the end of the day seemed to be Joey’s thought. His position as the leader of our group would be the one I eventually took for my last Yosemite trip and gave me the story that began this post

And look I get it, it’s not particularly much to just go a little off the path. But to 6th grade me that was a genuine surprise. It wasn’t like it was physically hard for us to get to the top of the Dam. It just required someone to shrug and go “Fuck it”.

Honestly, that approach works ok for me in life too. Joey was onto something, even if sometimes you almost end up sharing your breakfast with a bear.

1. I didn’t start drinking coffee for another 6 months until I worked at Peets but I liked the line too much to cut. ↩︎
2. FYI this IS NOT the way to deal with Grizzly bears. I need to write up the Alaska trip ugh. ↩︎
3. Yes the same one that always comes up in these posts ↩︎
4. Still my phone’s contact photo for her though. ↩︎
5. Like you couldn’t use it to slap the deck. We didn’t take your hand off at the wrist. ↩︎
6. To be fair the reward was instead of a normal merit badge you get a scuba license which doesn’t expire (which is pretty sick). ↩︎