You know one of the terms I don’t like is “camping”. I usually prefer to say, “I’m heading out of town for weekend” or whatever the time period that I’m heading up to woods or wilderness to get away from it all.

Camping as a concept has a lot of problematic ideas surrounding it in my mind.

Camping as something you do in a developed facility. In many people’s minds, camping is something you do in an intensively developed facility, with flush-toilet bathrooms and showers, security patrols and often electricity. Camping is seen as something you pay for, not just some place in woods, an old driveway or dirt pad along a dirt road somewheres in the forest or a wilderness.

Camping is something you do in ear-shot, eye-shot of others. Rarely do I camp anywhere I can see or hear anybody else. I don’t want people hearing my music, smelling the smoke from my fires or noise from my guns. I’d rather not keep it down, and a vlaue my privacy.

Camping is primarily about a destination, a camp. True I often hang around camp, but it’s more than sleeping. I ride trail and hike, in the summer months I fish and swim. In the autumn I hunt sometimes. I’ve been known to work remote from camp, and in many ways camp is a home base in remote country and not a destination alone. That said, I do like lazy afternoons in the hammock, doing a bunch of cooking and of course a big ol fire.