Evolution of Tent to Truck Camping

[PackRat]

We used to go to Yosemite Camp 7 the last week of July/first week of August for quite a few years back in the late '50s. My folks used an umbrella tent but I had my trusty Army pump tent & air mattress. That was our summer get-away from SF for about 6 years or so.

They bought a place on the Russian River with beach frontage in about 1960 and my oldere cousin and I switched to Army hammocks with the netting/roof cut off. That lasted up into the late 60s for me.

Next was the 55 GMC I fixed up; I wasn't going back to a tent on the ground again with my girlfriend so I rigged up my trusty pup tent over the 8' bed of the Jimmy and added a mattress to it for a year's worth of camping.

I picked up an old cab-height 8' camper that was sitting down in Sausalito near the Heliport for next to nothing, maybe $75.00 and after dumping the old fish netting in it and cleaning it with Clorox and adding some Walnut stain to the wood and cleaning the exterior aluminum and getting the windows to slide again, I used that for a couple summers...if my buddy was camping with me, he had his own tent but when I brought my girlfriend, the 48" width for sleeping was getting to be a tad tight.

Then one time I saw a guy back into the campsite next to me with a camper that looked exactly like mine until he opened the door and began jacking up his Alaskan 8 ft. NCO. After he gave me the usual tour Alaskan owners are wont to do, I had to have one.

I bought an F-150 and found a 60s-era 8' NCO like his and loved it. It was still a bit tight in there, but the option for bug-free sleeping, a propane stove, a water tank/sink and an icebox made it seem like heaven. I made a shakedown trip alone up to Wild Plum camp on the Yuba that Memorial weekend. At about 4am when it started pouring rain I woke up, looked out the rear window as most of the tent campers cleared out and went back to sleep. Next trip was Yosemite with my wife and we stayed in an un-organized place just short of the park. It has started raining with lighting as we got out of the valley but when we arrived, I hopped out, raised the top and we snuggled in listening to the rain falling.

We used that on for a few years until the lack of a restroom became an issue so I sold it and got a Lance. I had to upgrade to an F-250 to carry that beast. It lasted a few years more until a hit-and run destroyed the left front jack and tore open the Cab-Over. It died a miserable death.

A couple years later, I decided on another Alaskan, only this time the C/O was required so we could both have some more sleeping space. I wanted an 8' C/O and now one is in the driveway! It is still a "minimalist rig" by most standards as it had an icebox and sink/H2O tank and a stove, but no furnace and no built in toilet but came with a Thetford.

It still isn't as well outfitted at that old Lance was, or most of what you guys have and has no batteries or solar or anything. If we camp where AC is available, thats fine, we have lights inside. If we don't, then we just spend the time before sleeping outside and use my Coleman lantern. It runs on campfuel of course, not batteries.

We are not planning on long hauls so this works for us as dinner is a BBQ and breakfast is oatmeal and fruit and juice/coffee. I plan to add a small trailer (4' x 6') with a tailgate on it to carry additional things like another icechest, tarps, other things I don't want to haul in the Alaskan like nasty BBQ grills & brickquetts or camp table & chairs. That means we can just pull in at night, raise the roof and crash out. We can "set up" camp the next am.

If you see us in this rig this summer in the Sierras, stop by to say Hi and have a coffee/soda/adult beverage.


Happy Camping!

 

[klahanie]

^ Nice to get to know you a bit more, Mr PR.

I like this line ...

if my buddy was camping with me, he had his own tent but when I brought my girlfriend, the 48" width for sleeping was getting to be a tad tight.

Thank goodness for old timers and their fondness for understatement.

Cheers,
David

 

[Bosque Bill]

PR, thanks for the history. Our family had one of those heavy, canvas umbrella tents, too. Touch the canvas in the rain and it leaked - good times.

After college I got a used 1968 VW Campmobile with the "pop-top." Severely underpowered (especially since all the cabinetry was built with 3/4" plywood with a formica veneer.) It had an ice-box, fold out table, small water tank with sink and hand pump. It had great clearance and could handle many jeep trails. I took it all over the US and Canada. My only vehicle for many years.

Those memories served as inspiration for my current Tacoma & FWC Fleet.

 

[2tallDA]

I was in Baja on the northwest coast at a couple of semi-remote spots.
Both times guys had Alaskans.
Nice to sit inside out of the elements down there.

 

[DavidGraves]

Howdy PackRat

It is nice to hear of other folks who enjoyed the outdoors in younger years and still enjoy it.

BTW, several of your relations live in my barn, including a black and white long hair with furry tail...looks like a cat.

David Graves

 

[Rdy2Roam]

Great story! And soon to be a proud owner of a 8' co Alaskan on the 19th.
Hopefully one day I'll run into you out there in God's country.

 

[craig333]

Of course as a kid you just have to poke the canvas anyway. Not at all an uncommon story here. To go from being that guy that packed up a wet tent and bailed to being the guy that watches those guys, its not bad

 

[HughDog]

Of course as a kid you just have to poke the canvas anyway. Not at all an uncommon story here. To go from being that guy that packed up a wet tent and bailed to being the guy that watches those guys, its not bad

"That Guy, who watches those guys!" So true - Back in the day, my wife and I did a couple month trip up the West Coast into the Canadian Rockies and back down to San Diego, most nights in a tent and some in a suburban if it was super rainy. Was a blast!

We recently took the kids tent camping, then immediately decided it was time to get elevated!

 

[takesiteasy]

PackRat, thanks for the good story. I grew up camping in the BWCA wilderness with my family- Mom and Dad and little sister had the canvas wall tent. My brother and I shared a tiny canvas pup tent. I bet those two tents together weighed about 100 pounds, more when wet! Spent many a wet night in that pup tent- just thought that was the way camping was, haha. Good times!

My wife and I continued the tent camping and canoeing with our kids, but graduated to better tents. Usually stayed dry but not always. Once I retired we decided it was time for the luxury of a camper. We do enjoy it. We still do most of our living outside but having a nice bed safe from rain and critters is quite lovely.

 

[Moose Dog]

Thanks for the stories, this is so relatable. Dad and us kids used to camp in what I called the " Charlie Brown Tent", a little blue triangle that stayed up, barely - sagged when dry and sank when wet. Half length sleeping bag mats that seemed to move around and expose the rocks all night. Had a great time of course. Just this week I was joking about getting a comfy truck camper is what happens when you Charlie Brown Tent it in your youth.

And last week I saw that sleeping bag mat behind glass on historical display at the American Alpine Club headquarters..hahahaha...lord knows the tent might be there too...

 

[PackRat]

Yosemite was different then...just not so many people visiting. I have fond memories of it:
The Rangers were cool, helpful and entertaining.
The nightly call at 9:00pm in the valley "Let the fire fall" and on cue they started pushing the coals off Glacier Point....
We gathered downed firewood up on the road to Tuolumne Meadows with a special eye to the Sequoia bark which burned like anthracite coal ….for free....
Bicycle rentals
An occasional horse ride at the stables
The movie theater
Rafting on the ice-cold Merced
Seeing a satellite go over one time
Watching fearless climbers at El Capitan
Lugging a big chunk of ice from he machine just across the footbridge from Camp 7 for the ice chest
Listening to the bears raid the garbage cans almost every night
Cooking on a propane stove or BBQing in the fire pit

The one time a bear got into our ice chest to get the apple sauce my Mom made from the apples we picked from the trees a bit downstream from our camp. I stayed in my pup tent but Mom was rather pissed off and grabbed a bucket of water and threw it on Mr. Bear as he was enjoying the apple sauce. I guess he had enough or that cold water bothered him so he ambled off towards where the two garbage cans in our area were located. Evidently her yelling at the bear woke up a few folks who witnessed the encounter and the word got back to the Rangers. One stopped by the next morning to get the real story and he thought it was hilarious without insulting my Mom at all, but suggested giving up the 'sauce might have been the better part of valor so-to-speak.

Ah yes those were the days...I must have been about 9 or 10 and that was one of the coolest things I ever saw my Mom do at that age. I was just awed she would take on a bear like that (so was the Ranger).

Years later maybe 2005? my wife and I went back to Yosemite with an Alaskan on my F-150. No campsites available but we could drive around and I could show her the valley and Glacier Point before we went on over the Tioga Pass. I was really shocked at how SMALL the valley really is. When you are 10 years old... its like HUGE. There was a major flood in 1997 and Camp 7 was no longer even there, it being restored to a more forest like environment. We walked right to the big tree next to the bike path and that was a landmark for me to find our old site and sure enough I could show here exactly where I spent some of the best summers of my childhood, me being a SF city boy. We drove around but basically you could not even find a legal place to park hardly and with no site, we had to leave the valley and camp elsewhere. Aside from all the tourists though, it is still a magical place to visit but if you go, try the early part of the season or the late part to avoid the masses of visitors if possible. You may encounter some rain/cold but hey, you aren't tent camping so who cares?

 

[JCatt]

Great stories PR thanks for sharing!

 

[CougarCouple]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts and memories. I enjoyed the read.
Russ

 

[Andy Douglass]

Tents are great, but here are some landmarks in my life that have led me to campers:

#1: I must have been around 12, doing a boy scout overnight after a 10 mile hike. I had put a tarp under my tent to keep water out. Boy was I wrong. When the skies opened up that night, all the water that ran down the side of my little dome tent hit that tarp which efficiently collected it right under my sleeping bag, where it seeped through the bottom of the tent. I remember having one of those chemical hand warmer things and huddling around that all night in my sleeping bag, which was now a sleeping sponge. The next day on the hike out, rangers told our troop about a missing hiker. Two of my good friends ended up spotting the poor woman across a ravine and escorting her out, which was about the coolest thing possible for boy scouts. Our whole troop milked that story for all it was worth at summer camp that year. I'm sure by the end of it, everyone at Camp Navarro knew of our technical rescue of a bus load of orphans in Antarctica.

#2: As a young adult, I was on a big group camping trip in the Mendocino National Forest, near Hough Springs. I set up my brand new tent in a nook in some scrubby brush, to get out of the sun and wind. One side of my tent was in direct contact with some brush, and the first morning I found that either insects or rodents had used the brush as a sort of scaffold to do overnight demolition work on my tent, which now looked like swiss cheese on that side. Normally I wouldn't sleep through something like that, but I must have been tired from all the 12 ounce lifts I had done the night before.

#3: My wife and I were on a camping road trip around NE California. After a nice stay at Blue Lake at the south end of the Warner Mountains, up near Alturas, we decided to change locations to Berney Falls, which my wife had childhood memories of. It was packed, so we mosied down to the Lassen National Forest, just outside of Chester, an area I had camped many times. This was a huge trip in our evolution from tent campers to camper campers because we had decided to get a gigantic tent and use an air mattress with actual bedding. It was great to have that nice new Coleman tent, which you could probably park a Prius in, with a queen size bed. While I was setting it up in Chester, I was pounding stakes in the ground with my razor sharp hatchet. The point of the hatchet just barely kissed the tent. Turns out tent material does poorly against sharpened steel.

#4: Every broken or missing tent pole, bent stake, inadequate sleeping pad, mildew spore, Spine Destroyer© brand rock, too-small stuff sack,etc.

Tents, we've been through a lot together. But we need some time apart. I'm sure we might run into each other at some point, but we can't continue like this, it's just not healthy.

 

[PackRat]

Back in the day, camping with the Boy Scouts entailed setting up the tent and then digging a trench around the perimeter so any rain running off the tent would be channeled away from us. The key being to try to find a FLAT place to begin with as a depression would funnel water into the tent so a crowned or slight rise location was preferable. We also dug the famous "Grease Pits" where bacon grease and other food debris was placed and buried, we dug slit trenches for human waste and attempted to master knot tying so as to make a seat over the trench and we even tried not only to fashion a tripod over the fire pit (yes, we dug down after clearing a dead zone around it) as well as an actual table if we were working on our knot tying.

Nowadays it is ecologically not cool to do all this damage to an area as it is not usually possible to return a site to its original condition but then again, we were often camping in Golden Gate Park.

I think good camping citizens observe what the divemasters told us when we learned to scuba dive..."Take only pictures, leave only bubbles". The wife and I usually managed to fill the pockets of our BCs in many places with an accumulation of trash consisting of the usual crap....plastic bags, plastic beer cups, smashed up beer cans (check for critter habitation), odd pieces of junk. In the Caribbean, most dive operators are happy when divers do a little cleanup while enjoying the reefs. My trash collection Karma rewarded me one time when I was going to pick up a piece of trash that turned out to be a very nice dive knife in a rubber sheath that disguised it while laying on the bottom.

These days, there is no reason to leave your trash or the junk others leave half-burned in a fire pit...you can just add some of that to your own trash you will either deposit in a bear-proof waste bin or if one is not available, just take home with you. I know how beautiful it is to pull into a great spot to camp only to find that the beach or the bushes are full of garbage some bozo decided he wanted to toss out.

 

[smlobx]

?......
I think good camping citizens observe what the divemasters told us when we learned to scuba dive..."Take only pictures, leave only bubbles". The wife and I usually managed to fill the pockets of our BCs in many places with an accumulation of trash consisting of the usual crap....plastic bags, plastic beer cups, smashed up beer cans (check for critter habitation), odd pieces of junk. In the Caribbean, most dive operators are happy when divers do a little cleanup while enjoying the reefs. My trash collection Karma rewarded me one time when I was going to pick up a piece of trash that turned out to be a very nice dive knife in a rubber sheath that disguised it while laying on the bottom.

These days, there is no reason to leave your trash or the junk others leave half-burned in a fire pit...you can just add some of that to your own trash you will either deposit in a bear-proof waste bin or if one is not available, just take home with you. I know how beautiful it is to pull into a great spot to camp only to find that the beach or the bushes are full of garbage some bozo decided he wanted to toss out.

I agree and I think many here do the same.
Back in my earlier days while doing some commercial diving off an oil rig I would routinely pick up junk that had fallen off (or been thrown off) the rig. One day I found an almost new Penn offshore rod with their International 50W reel! I still have that outfit!
We now do a lot of kayaking in my Tarpon 120 on Smith Mt. lake and it's not unusual to have the back hatch filled with plastic bottles etc that will never decompose...