Camplore

In the great tradition of s’mores, thinking about camping always brings me around to food. Good food, dried food, dehydrated stuff, dense food, kept from animals food, and dirt-brushed-off-of-it food. Oh, yes, don’t forget ashes-picked-out-of-it food.

Everything does taste better when you’re camping, from plain ole hotdogs, to omelettes, to cherry pie, to steaks. Lately I’ve been exposed to a bit more of the gourmet variety of preparation, thanks to Food Network, Alton Brown and America’s Test Kitchen, but they don’t often head for the campfire/coals/campstove with a castiron dutch oven/skillet/griddle or lightweight water pot. Here are a couple of my old favorites - hiking breakfast, refrigerator-access dessert, and a casserole that’d work great over coals.
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Wild people have always made me more nervous than wild animals, but I am quite a coward about animals. Just ask my friends about me getting trapped in the latrine with a porcupine outside the door.

My favorite camping areas are frequented by black bears when the wild food picking isn’t so good, or they get trained to come down out of the hills for the garbage bait someone left out for them. My closest encounter with a bear problem was in Gunnison Park, Colorado, on a family camping trip when I was in fourth grade.
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I just started jogging a little this past fall. I still don’t really like it yet, but I dislike it less than I did when I started. I was bored to exhaustion though, pounding my feet on the pavement. So I stirred up a repertoire of camp songs. I eventually broke down and bought a little Sony Walkman SRF-M80V. It has tv, weather and am/fm, so I’m set for receiving music, though my favorite station is our local NPR afiiliate. I can jog to a good interview on Morning Edition or Fresh Air. Then my sweetie bought me an iPod mini, so I can control what I’m hearing. But sometimes still, I disconnect the earphones, listen to the birds, and just rattle through a few camp songs.
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I learned a hard lesson in November. First time I ever had to learn this one, and I’ve learned many.

I took a tent I’ve had for years and set it up in the beautiful Witchita Mountains National Wildlife Preserve during a campout with my son’s Boy Scout troop. I had it to myself, being the only woman in camp, so stationed my sleeping bag in the center and all the paraphernalia conveniently around it.

Well, it was pretty cool weather, and it rained. And rained. Apparently, my poor old dome tent hasn’t seen a lot of rain in a long time. Somewhere around 1 a.m., I woke up when my feet sloshed into a puddle of water. Yes, in my sleeping bag. The one dripping place in the tent was at the very top, where a puddle of water had accumlulated in the slack where the poles crossed, under the fly. Needless to say, the rest of the night was not happy. Luckily I didn’t drive, so I got to sleep on the long drive home the next day, but now I am tent shopping.
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I frequently reflect on the enjoyment I got out of camping as a young woman in New Mexico. I always felt like I belonged there, and would much rather be out in the wilderness with the animals (I never had a bad experience) than close to a city with all the lunatics (they always made me way more nervous). Nowadays, however, the city has come to the wilderness, at least in terms of the numbers of people who traverse the ways that were not well known only 30 years ago.
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You gotta really love camping to love winter camping.

I’m not a huge winter camping fan, but I find it more enjoyable than mid-summer in sweltering (not-West) Texas. I haven’t camped in deep snow for an extended amount of time, but several nights in the deep cold have been fun.

With that in mind and fresh memories of cold weather, here are some pointers about winter camping equipment and safety.
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I like to read. I know people who like to read even more than I do, and I am usually the beneficiary of their completed “dead tree” books or the occasional gift certificate for an online or MobiPocket read on my Sony Clie. I’ve grown accustomed to the size and scrolling of a book page on my PDA, and I’m always happy that I have a book with me when I’m waiting somewhere.
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Ever smelled a Ponderosa Pine tree? Not just your average pine tree – like the Scotch pine or Blue Spruce you dragged into the house over the holidays that dropped pine needles and sap on your floor (though they are lovely in their own right). I don’t imagine many people would want a Ponderosa to decorate – they typically have a long tall bare trunk before the clump of long needles at the top.
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Corn syrup, sugar, starch, gelatin. Doesn’t sound that fascinating does it? But whip those ingredients into a 1 inch cylinder (better yet, just buy a bag of marshmallows), poke a stick through one, and suspend it over a heat source, and you have a marvel of camp lore.

Long before s’mores became the preferred camper’s sweet tooth fix was the marvel of the marshmallow.
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Funny how even people who are afraid of most bugs seem to like ladybugs. My youngest, Eric, is a typical rambunctious 6 year old boy, but becomes a quivering mass at the site of a mosquito or fly, and scrambles to get as far away from it as he can. But put a ladybug in front of him, and he is quickly engaged in watching it, with a smile on his face.

In the mid-1970’s, I was on a burro pack trip in July in the Sacramento Mountains of New Mexico. About 5 other girls and I covered 8-10 miles a day on foot for 10 days, with our trusty, if stubborn pack animals hauling our equipment and food. Even in those days, it was a rarity to experience a pack saddle, especially for over a week at a time. It rained reliably each afternoon, usually for 3 or 4 hours.

Some 5 days into our journey, we arrived at our campsite (really a sloping field with only landowner’s permission and a nearby spring to establish it) and unloaded our gear. The ground was soggy, but it had stopped raining. Per our routine, we tossed up the pup tents (canvas, 4ft wooden poles at each end, and no floor) and quickly stowed our personal equipment inside. Then it was off to collect wood for a fire for supper and care for the burros. Probably 2 hours later, we returned to our our tent to unroll our sleeping bags.

What a surprise awaited us.
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