It was around ten years ago. Madera Canyon. Arizona. Just south of Tucson. We tent-camped in the small high-elevation campground near the end of the road. Early in the morning, shortly after sunrise, we drove down the canyon for coffee at a fast-food drive-through and then right back up again. A wonderful spot to photograph the migrating birds of Arizona’s lovely springtime. While pulling out the tent stakes, when it had gotten hot, later in the day, I decided it was time. It came upon me suddenly. I had lost the will to camp.
Camping has run pretty deep for myself and my family. It is the Utah effect. Well for me, for most of my youth, it goes back to staying in nearly collapsed cabins and funky old trailers with my Dad’s relatives in the high country of northwestern Montana. For a while there were big awkward tents at midwestern camps of junior high-school summers, and much later damp and only sometimes pleasant tent camping in the Adirondacks and northern New England of college and grad-school and the early working years. Then the move to Utah when camping changed to something extraordinary.
It isn’t just the scenery. It is the weather. Better put, the climate. Also the proximity. Park City has a lot within a five hour drive: Moab, Yellowstone, the Grand Tetons, the Uintas, Zion, Capitol Reef, Canyonlands, the Wind River’s, the Ruby’s, Valley of Fire, the San Rafael Swell, the high peaks of the Utah west desert that no one knows about, the Escalante Canyons that no one used to know about, Flaming Gorge and Dinosaur. One can go on and on. And that is pretty much what we did. If we weren’t skiing on most weekends we were camping. It started with a small tent and two dogs. It evolved to larger tents and two kids and two dogs, and then a VW Campervan with two kids and two dogs. Different dogs and larger kids. It was also the absence of limitations. In Utah, Idaho, Wyoming and Nevada you could camp almost anywhere. You wouldn’t be bothered.
For a long stretch it was Glacier National Park and the canyons of the Escalante river for me. Backpacking with a view camera. Those were awesome days. Unforgettable. Bounding around hard dirt and gravel corners in deep and remote desert in an old Ford Bronco or just off the highway in the campervan. Stepping gracefully through slots and over 10,000-foot ridges. And, like the song goes.
These are days you’ll remember.
10,000 Maniacs
Never before and never since, I promise, will the whole world be warm as this.
And as you feel it, you’ll know it’s true that you are blessed and lucky.
It’s true that you are touched by something that will grow and bloom in you.
Then on that April day in Arizona, or maybe it was early May, it stopped. I had started spending more and more time in Mexico, Central America and Europe in inexpensive hostals and language-school dormitories. I had traded in the long drives for long flights. I loved speaking Spanish. I loved the beaches and the big cities. It felt right that it was changing. I was changing.
Then during the pandemic, I purchased new things. I was determined. I would regain the will to camp. New plans were made. Camping caught on again with the rest of the family but alas not so much for me. The campgrounds were all crowded. And there were rules in a lot of places where there had not been any rules before. Some of the National Parks had developed internal bus systems. Places that had been unknown to almost everyone had been converted to National Parks or Monuments and were suddenly known to almost everyone. The internet allowed tiny dusty towns to boom. Influencer van life became a thing. Reservation systems were digitized. RV’s were accommodated.
A couple weekends ago we all headed up to Lava Hot Springs in southeastern Idaho. The original plan had been for a campground at the base of Mount Timpanogos near Sundance in the Wasatch mountains but the campground hadn’t opened with the Spring because the intensity of the Winter had wrought some damage.
Lava Hot Springs was a good choice as an alternate because we know it well. It offers the hot springs and also is a quaint small town. Although I remember perhaps twenty years ago we went into one of the diners and in the next booth there were five or six kids, boys, with swastikas tattooed on the sides of their shaved heads. It is amazing in retrospect. At the time I found it displeasing but more along the lines of thinking the kids were relatively harmless idiots. The United States sure has changed. A similar sight today would be more alarming.
One of our daughters went to grad-school in Idaho and studied trout in the streams around Lava Hot Springs. The other was a high school diver and they have an Olympic-sized diving platform so she would go up there with her diving programs. So it is familiar terrain. It was more beautiful than I remembered on this trip because of the richness of the green in the mountains. Normally they are dry and a bit grey or brown.
The other big thing to do there is to float, on inner-tubes, the Portneuf river which runs through the center of town. This can be a tad rough even on a good day. It was especially so when we were there because of the extent of the runoff and commensurate river hydraulics. So all of that had been put on hold by the several businesses that rent the tubes. There is also a folk festival which used to be in April but I am told it has moved to September.
So I gave the will to camp one more opportunity to rise. It didn’t. Well maybe it did a little. I brought an old tent that I hadn’t used in many years but I had used a lot a long time ago. Before kids. Different dogs. It went up easily and stayed dry despite a substantial rain and wind storm. But perhaps there was a little too much of my crawling around on the ground in the process of putting it up and taking it down and getting in and out of bed. My kids are excellent camp cooks with all of the things. So the food was great. The fires were good. The conversation was warm. The weather was generally pretty fine. But did I mention all of that crawling around on the ground. A few photos from the trip have been added to the idaho usa 1 gallery in my photo galleries. I realize that I have neglected idaho in my photography endeavors. I’m not sure why. There are a few images from Twin Falls, Ketchum and now Lava Hot Springs. There are probably many slides awaiting scanning but I don’t remember anything of great note. It somehow slipped through the cracks. I should probably fix that. Maybe I’ll camp.