Family Camping » Camping Tips

5 Reasons Family Camping is Fantastic

Roy Scribner — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:56:48 +0000

Your family can get a lot more out of the camping experience than just campfires and marshmallows. Spending time outdoors with your kids is the best way to experience nature in real-time, without the electronic distractions of our everyday lives. Here are five reasons that family camping is fantastic. Do you have some others? I would love to hear them!

Time with your kids

When it comes to participating with your children, as opposed to just watching them do an activity by themselves, there is nothing better than family camping. Parent and kids can setup a tent, cook meals, go on hikes and share the outdoors experience together.

Time outdoors

No video games needed, here! Kids love being outdoors

No TVs, no MP3 players and no video games. Will your kids (or you!) be able to survive a weekend without electronic stimuli? You might be surprised to find yourself missing the electronic entertainment, more than your children do.

Kids have always loved being outdoors and today’s youth are no different. They just don’t get as many opportunities, with today’s dual-income lifestyles, shorter vacations and year-round sports.

Rewarding

You may not feel like being challenged, but overcoming challenges is inherently rewarding. It is rewarding for kids and doubly rewarding for you, because you get to experience the parental pride of seeing your children overcome challenges.

Family camping challenges can range from getting the campfire started, to being the only dry family in the campground, after an overnight thundershower. Each time you take your family camping, be sure to look for these opportunities to challenge yourself and your children.

Educational

Vertical rock strata in Henry Coe State Park - no textbook required

Do you remember field trips, when you were in school? I can remember field trips to Alcatraz, a nature preserve and a watershed, when I was in school. Nowadays, it seems like our kids are lucky if they get to visit a pumpkin patch, in October!

Our kids are not getting the “outdoor time” that we enjoyed in our youth, which leaves a void in their educational upbringing. There are a lot of things that you can read in a textbook, that just don’t sink-in until you actually see and touch them, in person.

Social

A makeshift teeter-totter in Lassen National Park

Camping is an inherently social activity and you will meet some great families, who you would have never met, otherwise. It is always a lot of fun when we are camping in Oregon or Washington and we meet another family from the Bay Area, here in California.

Likewise, we meet a few families every year, here in California, from our home state of Oregon. We have seen a tremendous amount of social development in our kids, and we attribute a lot of that to learning how to “break the ice” with other kids, when we are camping.

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How to Keep Camping After School Starts

Roy Scribner — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 13:34:33 +0000

Where did the summer go? It seems like just a few weeks ago, when we were making plans for spring camping and, now, here we are with the kids heading-off to school! For the majority of family campers this, along with the upcoming Labor Day holiday, marks the end of camping for the year. But, you do not have to hunker-down for winter, just yet. There is still a lot of great camping opportunities to be had, particularly since a lot of other families have already rolled-up their sleeping bags, for the year.

Quick weekend getaways can be just as rewarding as longer trips

School Calendar

There are certainly additional challenges to planning camping trips when the kids are in school, but the one of the best places to start is with your school district’s calendar. In addition to the standard holidays, there are teacher in-service days and school half-days that present great opportunities for getting away for a family camping trip.

Even though the prime camping season is over, it is still important to look at the calendar and make reservations as early as possible. This has the added benefit of setting a definitive date, rather than making a last-minute decisions and rushing to get everything together.

Shorter Trips

I will be the first to admit that I am a terrible planner, so one of the tactics we use during the school year is family camping trips to county parks and state beaches that are nearby. With the kids home from school at 2:00, they can finish-up any remaining homework from the week, by the time I get home at 4:30. This gives us an hour to get on the road and another hour to get to the campsite, before sundown.

Frozen pizzas, like these from Trader Joe’s, make quick Friday night meals

I love week-long camping trips, but these Friday night through Sunday morning trips makes-up the majority of our family camping, throughout the year. It may sound short and rushed, but we find that these quick trips are a great break for everybody. The key to pulling these off is having the camping menu set and everything packed, before Friday.

Backyard camping

We are fortunate in that our kids are still young and school sports is not something that we have to deal with, yet. For the rest of you, though, school sports can put a serious damper on any weekend getaways. This is where backyard camping can save the day.

You may not live in a national forest, but a family backyard campout still encompasses the best of family camping – togetherness, bonding, fresh air and a little adventure. Besides, you invested in all that cool camping gear, so why not put it to good use?

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What is Your Favorite Camping Trip this Summer?

Roy Scribner — Sun, 01 Aug 2010 17:11:15 +0000

There is a lot of camping left this year, but now that we’re kicking-off the month of August I thought it would be a great opportunity to reflect on our family camping trips, this year. We have certainly noticed an increase in campers – several of our popular spots are booked solid, into September. Despite that, however, we have scored some great last-minute sites and taken advantage of some often overlooked, first-come, first-served campgrounds.

The Beach

The kids discover a live sand dollar on a beach camping trip, this spring

It’s hard for us to talk about a favorite camping trip, without a recent beach trip coming up. Every time we camp at the beach, the kids discover something new. When I think back over the years, the number of exciting stories that the kids came back with is staggering. Seals frolicking in the surf, dolphins feeding just outside the surf zone, orcas passing by, pelicans dive-bombing their prey – it seems like there is something new, every time we go.

One of the things that the kids like to do at the beach is hunt for seashells, of course. On one of our beach camping trips this spring, the kids found a lot of sand dollars – and even a few unbroken ones, which is rare. Their most amazing discovery, though, was a live sand dollar. Okay, it’s questionable whether it was still alive, but it had all of its motile spines – like a layer of fine hair covering the shell. After lots of “oohs” and “awes” we returned it to the surf, in hopes that the tide would carry it back out to safer locals.

Camping Without the Kids

A rare camping trip without the kids

One of the things we did, this summer, was drop the kids off with their grandparents and head up into the mountains, all by ourselves. Our girls are nine, so it’s been a decade since we’ve camped without kids! This was a lot of fun and we got to go on some longer hikes than we could have, if the kids were with us.

One thing that struck me, camping without the kids, is how much less “stuff” we needed. It was also really relaxing, since we didn’t have three little ones to keep entertained (and fed!). This still isn’t something that we will do very often, but maybe it won’t be another ten years, before we go camping by ourselves, again.

I’m looking forward to some more beach camping, this fall – and I’m really hoping that we can get several Sierra trips in, too. Whether these trips become one of our favorites for the year remains to be seen, but one thing is for sure – we will try our best to make it happen!

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The Plague of Campground Garbage

Roy Scribner — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 13:22:26 +0000

During our recent multi-state family camping excursion I was struck by the amount of leftover trash that we found in many of the campsites that we occupied. “Dad, why are you taking pictures of garbage?” Asked my oldest daughter, who is used to seeing me snap lots of pictures for “the website,” but she thought it was strange that I was photographing old bottle caps, cigarette butts and discarded tent stakes.

An abandoned campfire in a remote portion of the Deschutes National Forest, in Oregon

“Why do you think people left this stuff here, for us to clean up?” I asked my daughter. “I don’t know,” she said, “but it sure is gross.” Gross indeed. We are used to finding some bottle caps and old aluminum foil, when we arrive in a new campsite, but the thing that struck me most on this trip is that we were camping in some pretty obscure and remote places. Even Lassen National Park is not heavily trafficked, particularly in early July when snow still covers much of the upper elevations.

In Six Rivers National Forest, California, someone attempted to chop this branch off for firewood

Discarded trash isn’t the only environmental damage that we came across, on our family camping journey. Right behind our campsite, in the Six Rivers National Forest, someone decided to cut their own firewood by trying to chop through a large tree branch. Never mind all the deadfall around the area, or the little market down road that sells firewood. They must have given up, but the tree is now heavily damaged.

Some of the backcountry garbage found during a 14-day camping trip through California and Oregon

This kind of stuff is so blatantly senseless that I really think the people responsible for it don’t realize that they are doing anything wrong. I don’t know how one reaches these people, because something like throwing a Pepsi® can on the ground is so foreign to me.

For all of the frustration over the seemingly endless supply of backcountry trash, though, there is hope in the next generation. While hiking through the redwoods one morning, we noticed a freshly-discarded soda can in the bushes, next to the trail. “Should we take it out?” My daughter asked, with no prompting from me. I didn’t even have time to get mad about the can.

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Planning a Great Summer Family Camping Vacation

Roy Scribner — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 17:19:31 +0000

A big summer family camping trip is not something that I would want to do every year and, indeed, it’s been four years since our last one, but with two full weeks of vacation available, this seemed like a great time for another. The difference between a “big” family camping trip and a regular summer family camping trip is the number of camping days involved. Big trips mean planning for things, like washing clothes, that you don’t normally worry about on regular camping trips.

Crags campground, in Lassen National Park, is first-come, first-served. We had the entire campground to ourselves, in the early afternoon of July 7th.

You might think that a two-week family camping vacation takes a lot of preparation, but many times you can get by with last-minute campsite reservations. In fact, I made all of our reservations on June 15th, for our family camping vacation that would begin on June 26th. Our plan was to travel up the northern California coast to the Jedediah Smith Redwood State Park. After a few days in the redwoods, we continued on up into Oregon’s Cascade Mountains. Finally, we would wrap-up our two-week vacation in Lassen National Park, on the way home.

Visiting one of the national parks has been a theme in both of our big family camping vacations. There are 392 national parks and I would like to eventually see them all. But for now, occasionally getting to share the national park experience with my children is satisfying, enough. At Crater Lake National Park it was the deep blue water, in Lassen National Park it was the snow and the bubbling mud pots – there is always something in these parks that the kids find interesting and memorable.

A two week camping vacation is a lot more work than a weekend family camping trip, which is one reason that we do not do this every summer. Even with a scheduled stop in civilization so that the kids could visit grandparents (and we could shower, wash clothes, restock food, etc.), there are a lot of meals and changes-of-clothes to account for. In addition to the logistics, there is the basic fact that you have a schedule to meet. It sounds like a small thing, but having to be somewhere on a specific date is a lot less relaxing than camping in one place.

Two federal campgrounds, two different restroom facilities. The Crags campground in Lassen has simple pit toilets, while the Panther Flat campground in the Six Rivers National Forest has flush toilets, a sink and coin-op showers.

You can start thinking about a big family camping vacation by making a list of all the places that you would like to visit, then grouping places together that can be seen on one trip. We limit any one day’s travel to four hours, which allows us to setup the campsite (usually at a state park) in the early afternoon and actually enjoy the place, before continuing on to our final destination. We also do not travel more than two days, in a row.

Obviously, you cannot see everything on one trip. It’s important to remember that this is still a vacation, which means more camping than traveling. Realize too, that if you are visiting multiple locations on one trip, you will only be able to get a general overview of any one place. This is fine for the kids, who tend to be more interested in variety, but may leave us parents wanting for more. I have been to Lassen twice, now – once as a child and once with my own children – and I still have not seen the Cinder Cone, in the northeast section of the park.

Finally, don’t forget your friends! Both times we have undertaken one of these multi-week journeys, some of our friends have been able to meet-up and camp with us, during some portion of our journey. This is a lot of fun for everyone and a great bonus to the trip, if you can coordinate it.