Car Camping

A stone’s throw to creature comforts

By Yitka Winn

I’ve always found the term “car camping” misleading, and a little wounding to my pride.

In my Midwest childhood, my family’s outdoors adventures were often limited to staking out a patch of dirt off the interstate under a glowing KOA sign. Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that the term “car camping” doesn’t seem to give campers enough credit, implying that we literally slept inside our vehicle.

Give us so-called car camping enthusiasts a little more credit, please. Let us stand, at least, apart from the RV crowd.

As a young’un, I glowed with pride that my father taught me to build campfires from scratch; during a summer trip to Yellowstone, I ran into a black bear while walking from our tent to the shower house to brush my teeth; on the Great Plains of Kansas, my family braved more than one midnight windstorm in a tent, the wind ripping the stakes from the cake-dry ground, our tent flying up around our bodies.

So diehard backpackers, don’t tell me I’m not a “real” camper.

In my adult life in the Northwest, I have the opportunity to do more backpacking than I could in my youth. While I appreciate the unmitigated sense of escape that’s possible on a backpacking trip, there are plenty of reasons to love a good camping adventure within a stone’s throw of my car.

Packing microbrews and Scrabble boards

Let’s begin with the packing process. At the end of a long week when I am ready to say sayonara to stress, packing for car camping is a breeze: there’s less planning necessary, fewer food challenges to consider, and in case of an emergency, your camp will likely be within driving distance of any forgotten supplies.

Coolers, grills, guitars, microbrew six-packs, and Scrabble boards are just a few of the creature comforts that, unless you’re extremely ambitious, are out of the question for backpacking trips, but remain fair game for car camping.

Pitching a tent can also be an easy, cheap, and rewarding way to complement some of your other favorite recreations: biking, day hiking, kayaking, etc. Your backpack undoubtedly won’t help you carry your mountain bike, but I’ll bet your car won’t mind hauling it along for a ride.

Tent sites run anywhere from free to $30 a night, so you’ll be able to save big on your adventures when exploring new outdoors playgrounds.

In recent years, I’ve found that car camping the night before running races away from home is a great way to soak up bonus fresh air. Before the Eugene Marathon this year, my boyfriend and I camped along the scenic McKenzie Highway in central Oregon. Lulled to sleep by the gentle pitter-pat of rain on our tent, I crossed the starting line of my race with a refreshingly clear head.

Ditch the alarm clock

You’ll enjoy forgoing the alarm clock and waking instead to the morning sun. If you need to get up before dawn, your car headlights can assist you in the dark. Sure, sometimes you forget your air mattress, and sometimes Northwest mornings are brutally chilly, and sometimes you accidentally leave your running kicks outside the tent on a rainy night…but as my aunt likes to say, everything is either a good time, or a good story. I’ve found this to be especially true with camping.

I do have a confession. At the end of my first true backpacking expedition on a rainy week in October, after tromping around in the woods for 70 hours of almost straight rain, our crew opted to car camp our final night.

While there was a tent pitched, I was not among the ones inside of it. No, I am chagrined to say that I spent that final wet, cold night nestled in the driver’s seat of my trusty Passat: car camping at its finest.

Perhaps the fallback option of a literal “car campout” is part of the charm of sleeping within reach of modern shelter from the elements. It is also a great way to convince your city slicker friends or reluctant young’uns to give camping a try.

At the very least, they’ll have a good story.

Resources

Trails.com: Virtual nationwide campground directory that pulls data from existing camping guidebooks, browsable by interactive state maps.
http://www.trails.com/activities.aspx?area=12242

Travel Oregon: Searchable database of 500+ campgrounds in Oregon, complete with detailed descriptions, photos, and maps.
http://www.traveloregon.com/Travel-Tools/Places-to-Stay/Search-Campgrounds.aspx

Books

Camping Washington, by Ron C. Judd, published by The Mountaineers.

Pacific Northwest Camping, by Tom Stienstra, published by Moon Outdoors.

The Best in Tent Camping: Washington & Oregon: A Guide for Car Campers Who Hate RVs, Concrete Slabs, and Loud Portable Stereos, by Jeanne Louise Pyle, published by Menasha Ridge Press.

Yitka Winn of Seattle has occasionally been known to throw a travel Scrabble board in her pack on multi-day treks as well.

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