A Tent Away from Home

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When the fire's safely out, everyone should be eager to start down the road to dreamland. As you turn in, the stars come out. Together with your family on these trails, you hear the wind as if for the first time; hear one another again perhaps for the first time in a very long while. The children's pride of accomplishment and their marvel of the day's events fold together in a warm feeling in your chest. Your hands unfold as you loosen your grip and let the day go. In alpine meadows you stopped to listen to your son name the cloud beasts above. Your wife waved from a waterfall and you saw her smile. Nearby, your daughter stooped and you both lost yourselves in the law, beauty and stunning complexity of a leaf. These moments will remind you of why you came.

A good rule for fires is: If it doesn't snap, don't burn it There's nothing dispiriting as watching a fire smolder under green and rotting wood.

Trail Etiquette

Travel lightly on the land. Stay on the trails in peak areas where the fragile Alpine biosphere can be kicked apart and torn from its rock bed. Litter should leave with you. Papers, banana,and orange peels add nothing to the beauty of a mountain top. Start fires only in existing fireplaces. Burn all your cans, flatten them, and pack them out. Only dead and down wood should be used for fires. Scavenge and assault standing deadwood only as a desperate last resort. Forget a sleeping mattress of fresh cut pine boughs. Leave the trees be and bring a pad. Use established campsites whenever possible and leave no mark on the land. Relieve or wash yourself, burying waste and washing with biodegradable soap at least 200 feet from water. When hiking, if others are in a hurry, or coming at you on the trail, stand aside so they may pass. Kindness to the land and courtesy towards your companions is the rule.

Camping Out In 1900

By Robert G.Koch

Like many other campers, we have accumulated and replaced camping gear over the years, but I wondered how much it would have cost to start out as a neophyte camper in about 1900, using the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalogue.

Today we have a lightweight umbrella tent with screen door, window, and roof, which is covered with a lightweight fly. Complete with plastic flexible ribs and wire stakes, the tent weighs no more than the Sears catalogue. In 1900 we might have ordered, say, a 7'x7' wall tent of 10-oz. canvas for about $5, plus $2 extra for a fly. With poles and stakes, the tent would have weighed about 40 pounds.

As new campers we would have been attentive to Sears' advice: "Do not drive the pegs straight, but angling; they hold very much better in this way. The tent being now up and guys all adjusted so they bear equal strain, then proceed to dig a V-shaped trench all around the tent, about three inches deep; this will insure you a dry floor at all times." Even with a moat we probably would have worried. Today, our lightweight sleeping bags rest on a compressed foam rubber mattress enveloped in a waterproof zippered bag, on a waterproof floor. In 1900, however, we might have opted for a "fleece lined blanket ...made of the very best rubber ...gotten up especially for hunters and prospectors who are compelled to sleep on the damp ground:" Ominously, no weight is listed, but add $2.75 to the cost. For colder weather, an arctic sleeping bag, weighing 20 pounds and costing $12. In any case we would have passed rip the U.S. folding cots, which weighed 15 pounds each.

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