Making Camp: Great Outdoors Only Gets Better

Wilderness living is not what it used to be. It is considerably better.

I thought about this after I spent five nights and six days camped in Tuolumne Meadows in the Yosemite National Park high country earlier this fall.

One reason I took the trip was that I escape to the Sierra Nevada whenever possible. My official rationale was that it would be a fine way to help my daughter Erica celebrate her 21st birthday, whether that was the way she wanted to celebrate or not. Of course she would have a good time. Who could spend time in the mountains and not enjoy it?

We headed up U.S. 395 equipped for anything, including some serious backpacking up into the peaks. In the end, we took the more relaxed option of setting up base camp at Tuolumne Meadows. From the campground, we would take each bucolic Sierra day as it came. If the mountain spirit moved us, we would move.

We attended a campfire talk one evening in which the volunteer ranger spoke of camping over the years since she was a girl just after World War II.

That got me thinking about my own 25 years of trekking and climbing in the Sierra, and why the experience is so much better than when I began in the 1960s.

First, the improvement in equipment is dramatic, and critical to enjoying the mountains.

My first backpack trips into the Sierra were hardships. Boots were leftovers from Air Force basic training. The tent was floorless Army surplus canvas that made a pretext of shedding rain for the first 10 minutes and then funneled the miseries of foul weather to the inside. Water would transform my $6 surplus duck-feather sleeping bag into soggy, cold, lumpy oatmeal. My pack--also from the surplus store--was a torture rack.

Some people still seem to find romance in cooking over an open fire. This is not romantic in the rain or snow. Nor is it especially practical at any time, particularly since wood is scarce and fires now are banned in much of the wilderness. Basically, campfire cookery is an efficient method of blackening the inside and outside of a pan and going hungry at the same time.

My little Whisperlite stove burned for our entire trip on one quart of gasoline. Bottled gas stoves are not quite so efficient, but are even easier to operate.

Gortex fabric, synthetic insulation, freeze-dried food and equipment design have revolutionized camping and backpacking. The gear not only is light, comfortable and weatherproof, but durable and efficient.

High-tech equipment ruptured the budget of the average backpacker in the 1970s, but became more affordable with the increased selection and competition of the 1980s. My new two- or three-person, four-season tent cost $325, about what I paid for a smaller version 20 years ago, considering inflation. The new one is also simpler to erect. Lightweight boots will break in before they break you in. And notice how long flashlight batteries last these days.

A second improvement in wilderness camping is that much of the backcountry is actually less crowded than it used to be. This is true even in Yosemite, contrary to the impression left by articles about how overuse and development have imperiled the park.

Indeed, Yosemite Valley is jammed with cars and people on a typical summer day. But the other 95% of Yosemite--more than 700,000 acres--is devoid of humankind most of the time. Meadows that once were trampled by sheep and visitors now thrive.

Erica and I came across a doe and her spotted fawn as we hiked up Budd Creek little more than a mile from busy Tioga Road. The deer were wary but not alarmed. They ambled on up the creek, grazing on the way. We saw them again. They moved on again. We saw them once more.

We spent the rest of the day around Budd Lake--one of the jewels of all the Sierra--and saw only five other people--two of them hikers passing through. Of the 3.5 million visitors to Yosemite each year, most never leave the roadside turnouts. Fewer than 2% venture into the backcountry overnight.

Yosemite backcountry usage has declined by more than a third since the 1970s. The theory is that baby boomers have their own babies now, and wilderness trips are not very practical. Our Tuolumne experience indicates that many former backpackers are camping at campgrounds with their small children.

A 1990 Time magazine article that raised alarms about the crowded wilderness (Headline: “Take a Number to Take a Hike”) looked forward to “a small clearing in the thickets: as the baby boomers age, their pursuit of rugged outdoor activities like white-water rafting and hiking the high trails is likely to decline.”

I think not. My hunch is that as soon as the kids are big enough to tote a pack, most of the boomers will be back on the trail, with their offspring in tow. There may never again be a better time to experience solitude in the wilderness than there is right now.

This leads me to a third observation: While wilderness travel may be thought of as a young person’s avocation, it is more fun and satisfying the older one gets--at least for me. When I struggled out of my lumpy sleeping bag on those miserable cold, wet mornings in the 1960s, I never thought I would be enjoying wilderness experiences in 1991 far more than I was then. Never have I camped so comfortably and pleasantly in the same spot for five consecutive nights as on this Tuolumne trip. I easily could have stayed there another five days, or all fall.

The secret is to have good equipment and know how to use it, to know the high county well enough to be comfortable and feel safe there and to savor the Sierra pretty much as it was savored 120 years ago by John Muir, who roamed the mountains with a blanket, a crust of bread and some tea.

I noticed one other difference on this trip to Tuolumne. In the old days, campgrounds always buzzed with activity by daybreak. Perhaps that was the only way to end the misery of trying to sleep on the hard, cold ground in primitive equipment. With their warm, comfy bags and cushy mattresses, modern campers seem content to push wake-up calls back an hour or two.

On our last morning at Tuolumne, I slipped out of the tent at 5:45, quietly heated coffee water on the Whisperlite and wandered down to where the Tuolumne River slips over polished granite with the elegance of silk on silk. One man was doing stretching exercises. A woman sat meditating cross-legged in the dewy grass. That was all.

We had the silent dawn to ourselves, just as John Muir experienced it: “How glorious a greeting the sun gives the mountains! To behold this alone is worth the pains of any excursion a thousand times over.”

And today, the pains are so much more painless.