A subtle makeover

Ned Aldrich stoops down to illustrate with his version of PowerPoint -- an index finger in the dirt of a newly graded road at a campground he’s rehabbing at Cedar Grove in Sequoia & Kings Canyon National Park.

His office walls are granite slabs that rise from both sides of a compact canyon about 40 minutes beyond Grant Grove. Silver ribbons hurtle down seams in the towering ridges, and the Kings River rages past the campground like surf in a churning froth.

Aldrich draws twin arcing lines to show the shape of a “pull-through” driveway, a relic from an earlier era of campsite design that will be trimmed to minimize impact.

“We’re going to chop one half of it, and then this will be the campsite right there,” says Aldrich, who spent 15 years as a ranger before moving to the National Park Service’s road detail.

The crew also will be removing chunks of timber placed around campsites in days of yore for a rustic effect, replacing them with granite boulders, a more natural decor than sawed-off tree trunks. Walrus-mustached Rick Phillips, dressed, like Aldrich, in ranger greens, explains how his team will move one of the granite behemoths.

“We read the rock how we want to bust it,” says Phillips, a maintenance mechanic. “Then we drill into it two-thirds down and fill it up with water. We put a charge that looks like a 12-gauge shotgun shell in the water. There’s a cone that has a primer charge on it that sits down on top of the charge.” A firing pin is pulled, and two camp ornaments are born.

Aldrich and Phillips’ camp make-over is part of the little-noticed hand of campground design. Call it “parkitecture,” a minimalist mix of layout, accouterments and etiquette that blends campers into the woodwork -- and a social scheme quite unlike their worlds back home.

It falls to an invisible brigade of campground conductors, including designers and maintenance staff, to keep the accent on the natural experience when parks are under siege by an incursion of larger vehicles, more convenience and runaway technology.

Besides restoring the look of Moraine campsite, concessions will be made for more citified amenities and swelling camper tonnage. Stainless-steel sinks will be installed outside the restrooms for dish duty. Parking spaces at some campsites will be lengthened to accommodate more RVs and bigger vehicles, though the park will continue to limit rig size to 22 feet and maintain a no-hookups policy.

Eleven campsites within Cedar Grove and 14 in Grant Grove recently have been outfitted for larger groups, from seven to 15 people. “Supersites” are on the boards for some California state parks to fill demand for extended clan outings.

Designer challenge

Under the watchful gaze of conifers whose tops have been dancing in the afternoon winds for centuries, change is afoot, triggered by a demographic shift. The classic national park campsite was designed for the nuclear family -- mom, dad and 2.5 kids, back when the closest thing to a satellite dish was the Big Dipper, picnic tables seated six and there was parking for one vehicle.

The trend today across all parklands is a much bigger tent, thanks to multigenerational campers and ethnic diversity.

“We’ve had a resurgence of something that disappeared in the early 20th century, and that’s the extended family, which might be a Korean caravan from Southern California with four matching vans or a big Hispanic family from Fresno,” says Bill Tweed, chief naturalist at Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park.

The trend is seconded by Kerry Gates, supervising landscape architect for California state parks. “We’re absolutely having bigger groups,” he echoes. “There’s now a much greater cultural group of users, extended families, who want to share their experience together.”

Gates is experimenting with a larger picnic table, larger food preparation areas, and he’s thinking about retrofitting some camping areas with yurts to accommodate more people. He notes “the social experience overrides the outdoor experience” these days in many state parks.

Most of the campgrounds in Sequoia Kings Canyon were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and ‘40s. Park officials have continued to tinker with the template laid down by the agency -- loop track, picnic table, fire pit, spigots and restrooms -- as they grapple with the unpredictable realm of human behavior and gauge camper impact.

They’ve gone through generations of fire rings and bear boxes to keep up with fickle visitors. But they also closed a 300-site campground and lodge in Giant Forest in 1970 when they concluded a sequoia grove and car camping weren’t sustainable.

At Moraine, Aldrich and Phillips, clutching a squawking walkie-talkie, are waiting for 600 tons of base rock to creep up the canyon for the new asphalt loop and revamped parking spots. The duo stands amid heavy equipment and a ghost campground, with pavement dug up and ragged picnic benches tipped up on one end for removal.

The paint-stripped wreck of a table at campsite 75 is an archeological homage to days of excess greasy bacon, overweight coolers and whittlers with too much time on their hands. A camper pictograph that reads “Vieter ‘74” saves the expense of carbon dating. Tall stalks of grass shoot up around the site, making it feel like an abandoned homestead along the Missouri Breaks.

This forlorn scene makes it clear how much the camping magic depends on how the table is set. Though the perception is that nature did all the work, a classic campsite requires the touch of parkitecture.

“The landscaping that the crews do within the site will give the impression of wilderness or development,” says Dan Blackburn, maintenance chief at Sequoia Kings Canyon. “They’ll use boulders to create a natural effect around the tent pads that give it that rustic or architecture feel.”

It’s a similar approach in state parks. Gates says his goal is to “perpetuate and not compromise the spirit of place.” He uses the local vegetation to provide privacy buffers between camps. If it’s not available, he plants trees and shrubs, using a native plant palette to keep the site as natural as possible.

When the stage is set, campers can suspend adulthood and slip away from it all. At Cedar Grove’s Sheep Creek camp, Costa Mesa residents Mike Marshall and his wife, Sharon, reveled in the decades they’d put between themselves and the Orange crush. Marshall said he’d been coming to Cedar Grove for 35 years because “nobody can find me. I’m just like these lizards crawling on rocks here. I’m just another lizard.”

The lizard impulse is driven by the prize at the heart of the camping experience: freedom, from the yoke of duty, complexity, chaos, hurry-worry.

When Barry Garst explored the meanings people attach to camping for his doctoral thesis at Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources this year, he found freedom at the top of the list -- “escape from urban areas, escape from the technologies and stressors of life, everything from work pressures to home pressures,” followed by interaction with families and fellow campers.

Crafting the natural ambience of a campsite is the easy part, but letting freedom ring when the sound is a whining generator or boom box croaking 50 Cent is the more artful piece of social engineering.

Before the first formal campgrounds were invented by the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service in the 1920s, there weren’t any limits on park behavior. Folks who chugged by wagon 3 miles per hour up the road to the Sierra in the 1890s could plop a tent anywhere they liked.

Along with structured campgrounds came regulations, though park management tries to make them feel more like etiquette. If a park feels restrictive, campers could lose a key value of the experience. Before they get to the rule book, park staff tries to head off conflict between neighbors with physical engineering, making sure there’s enough space between campsites, or the perception of it through vegetation buffers.

Tribal solidarity

But design alone is not always enough to hold back the siege of modern behavior. To keep the traditional camping ethic alive, there are rules, more of them than there used to be, says Bruce Hronek, who spent 32 years in the Forest Service and now teaches classes in recreation liability at Indiana University.

“The rules have come in,” Hronek says, “quite stringent for things like dogs on leash, no music after 10 o’clock, no cleaning fish under a water tap, warnings about ticks. There are a lot of do-nots now, which really takes away from the experience of self-sufficiency that camping was all about.”

Newer campers along with older ones are opting for more convenience, which is pushing the traditional tent campground into more developed territory. And this can touch off conflicts, mostly over the main flash point -- noise -- between RV users and tent campers.

Both national and state parks have “quiet hours” policies. In most of Sequoia Kings Canyon, generators must be shut down between 9 p.m. and 9 a.m. (10 p.m. to 8 a.m. in state parks). Music can’t be audible beyond your campsite.

For the most part, campers still fall in line behind the etiquette rooted in the first post-Victorian campgrounds. “Traditional campers set aside most of the anxieties of contemporary life and go back to a broader social trust,” says Tweed. “These same people who stay at home behind their triple-locked doors move into little tents and put all their property out and live next to each other in almost 98% harmony. The social rules of the campground hark back to another time, the early 20th century.”

Urbanites find their mouths uttering spontaneous greetings, handing flapjacks or bug spray to strangers. Mere presence in a remote campground is enough to make you a blood brother or sister to some veteran campers, who know you’d never make off with their lawn chairs.

Parkitecture helps conjure a tribal spirit, something that goes back a lot further than the National Park Service. As the last light drains from the sky at Cedar Grove, scattered orange shapes pierce the blackness. Around leaping campfires, engineers, customer service reps, health care workers, their families and friends tell stories, warm hands and gaze into glowing coals as our ancestors might have 60,000 years ago, taking refuge together from a dark world.

*

Joe Robinson can be reached at

joe.robinson@latimes.com.

*

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

SNAPSHOT

A campsite time capsule

Fire pits and bear boxes reflect human and wildlife trends.

Like tree rings on a sequoia, campgrounds have their own chronology: Fire rings, which along with bear boxes, are monuments to parkitecture that mark the passage of camping eras. The evolution of these trusty camp furnishings has been an experiment in open-air psychology.

The fire pit, which began with a simple circle of rocks, failed to rein in bonfires and proved tough to cook on. Next up, in the 1930s, it became a camp stove, a cast-iron box on a stone foundation with a stovepipe.

But as campers began to bring their own stoves in the ‘50s, stovepipes bit the dust and were replaced by the rectangular firebox with grill for all-purpose toast burning.

At this point, the campfire was no longer a culinary vehicle but a ritual bonding device, a nostalgic throwback to prehistoric times. Other models came into favor. A circular concrete pad with a grill on a hinge put the fire above ground. Campers tried in vain to contain the ashes with rocks. The current solution is a steel ring sunk into a pit with a heavy-duty grill on top, and, lo and behold, the original circle of rocks is back as a containment wall, forming a defensive perimeter to keep fires in check.

Bear boxes, were built to separate marauding Yogis from camp grub. The food lockups have swollen from their debut in the Sierra in the 1970s as ice chests that must be stowed inside of them have grown in size.

Bear boxes now are almost as big as seasonal rangers’ quarters, cracks Bill Tweed, chief naturalist at Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park. “They’re now 200% to 300% the size of the bear boxes we started with.”

Much roomier bear boxes, mercifully elevated off the ground, were installed just a couple of years ago at Cedar Grove. But stay tuned. A new and bigger generation of bear locker is in the works, promises Dan Blackburn, maintenance chief at Sequoia Kings Canyon.

-- Joe Robinson