Camping Classics
Responding to our request for your tales, Outdoors & Travel readers have confirmed that a campsite is a fertile field for everything from bliss to misery. Here’s a sampling of their favorite camping memories, which prove you don’t have to go to the end of the earth to find enough adventure for a good story.
Up in arms
Spokane Valley resident Norma Panther, 89, probably witnessed hundreds of lovely sunsets and pastoral views in her camping career. But when asked to come up with one vivid camping memory, she recalled the night in 1958 when she and her husband, Oscar, made camp up the Pack River only to find they were surrounded by cows “and possibly a mad bull.”
Undaunted, they snuggled into their mummy bags spread on a tarp under the stars.
“I was zipped in tightly with a kerchief over my face to keep the no-see-ums off my face,” she said. Cozy for a while, she was abruptly awakened in the middle of the night by a smack in the face.
“I was scared silly as I rammed my hand and arm out the little hole above the mummy bag zipper, waving my arm frantically and yelling, ‘Shoo! Shoo!’ “
Then she realized that Oscar was flailing his arm wildly, too, except that Oscar was still asleep and deeply involved in some sort of dream in which her face apparently was a punching bag.
No cows, moose or bears, going bump in the night, “just Oscar,” she said.
Creepy crawlies
Linda Harris remembers venturing on a camping trip west of the Cascades, and into the realm of even scarier creatures.
“As I awoke, I put my arm up above my pillow and felt something wet,” she said. “I thought perhaps the tent had leaked, but instead — to my horror — I saw a huge slug only inches from my head! I’m sure they heard me scream in the next county.”
But her gallant husband jumped to the rescue. “He got the culprit outside and killed it with our salt container,” she said.
While Harris says she’ll never, ever camp outside in Western Washington again, Jack Brooks of Spokane had an even closer encounter with a slug after driving in the night to the Dillingham area and crashing on the ground with mountaineering buddies for a little rest before climbing Glacier Peak.
At least one heat-seeking slug actually crawled into the sleeping bag with Brooks, who woke that morning in a disgusting mess he announced by simply crying, “I’ve been slimed!”
Her neck of the woods
Bill and Vicki Magee of Greenacres seem to be magnets for weird animal encounters such as the time a hound from a cougar hunter strayed into their North Idaho campsite. They had just finished cooking their usual campout breakfast of bacon, fried potatoes with onion, and eggs over the fire when the hound, wearing a radio collar, lumbered into camp and began terrorizing their dog.
“We are trying to fend off a dogfight as Bill is chasing the hound dog around with his fire poker stick while I am trying to get our dog’s chain undone from the tree and then up onto the steep steps of our camper and inside for safety,” Vicki recalled.
“We finally get the dogs separated. Bill turns his back for one second and the hound is up on our picnic table on all fours eating our breakfast off our plates!
“Finally the owner tracks his coon dog to our site and picks him up. I get our dog back out of the camper thinking it was safe. Not five minutes later, another coon dog saunters into camp and we start the process all over again!
Turns out they had set a dozen or more of the dogs loose a few miles away. Needless to say, our quiet weekend “away from it all” wasn’t that quiet.
Even more unusual, she said, was being rousted out of her sleeping bag by the sound of a cow elk romping through camp. Like the hounds, the elk had a collar around its neck, too.
“I snapped a picture as she came back out of the woods and onto the road,” she said. “It was special to see an elk while camping, but one with a necklace around her neck?
“When we got back home, I zoomed in on my digital pictures saw that it was a toilet seat with hinges and all, stuck around her neck. Apparently she had trashed someone’s outhouse and was the laughing stock of the herd. Probably all the other elk were calling her a “butt head.”
Bearly made it
Things had not been going well for Scott Griffith during a camping trip at Priest Lake State Park in the early 1970s. He’d already cut his foot on broken glass left on the beach, and then, as he limped to the bathhouse for a shower, he had to confront a bear that was rummaging through a garbage can.
“I eased past the bear, cleaned up and began to make my way back to our campsite,” he said. A chill ran up his back when he heard from behind him a panting “huff-huff-huff.”
“Knowing that bear was there, I sprinted shouting ‘Bear! Big bear! BIG BEAR!’ I could hear it chasing me and I ran as fast as my wounded foot would allow.
Still shouting “BIG BEAR! BIG BEAR,” Griffith plunged into the campsite and into the midst of the Hilsen family, which had invited him to camp with them. Only then did he turn to face the bear and take on the attack.
“Jumping into the campsite behind me, huffing and panting, was a dog,” he admitted. “A cute little white poodle, no less.”
As one would expect, nobody around the campfire believed there really was a bear.
Weathering the storm
Eric Dubes of Spokane electrified his family camping experiences during a group outing on a Lake Roosevelt beach.
After noticing a huge black thunderhead rolling into the canyon, Dubes and a friend raced back to camp from up-lake, tied up their boat just as the wind began to howl and the rain came down in sheets, and women and children were diving into tents.
“Then the thunder and lightning started,” he said. “The wind screamed louder and the rain came down harder. All of the other camps were flattened except mine,” he said, noting that he’d been teased by camping buddies for rigging such a bombproof tarp system a few days earlier when the skies were clear.
“All of the moms and kids were huddled in my tent under my tarp” and fear began engulfing the group and completely as the storm, he said.
People were rushing around trying to save their things from the storm, stowing them under my tarp and into the two vans that were in camp while Dubes manned a shovel and trenched around his A-frame tarp and tent to divert the flood from the crowd inside.
“When you are camped out like this there’s nowhere to go and no place to hide,” he said. “You just have to ride out the storm.”
Lightning struck ground nearby in the bay and the thunder seemed to be originating inside their craniums. Dubes and some of the men, wearing raincoats over their swimming suits, continued to hold the camp in place the best they could when a flash and crash hit simultaneously. Dubes was so startled, he shot into the air and felt the hair on his neck come to attention.
His landing wasn’t perfect, and his shin raked down along the sharp edge of a stump. He regrouped with his shell-shocked emergency operations team to assess damages.
“So there we were, Phil, Joe, Barry, Tod and me, watching the tumult surrounding us, blood running down my shin bone into my Tevas,” he said. “We were passing a pint of Black Velvet between us when Tod said, ‘All we can do is hang out and hope we don’t die.’
“It doesn’t seem so funny now 15 years later, but at that moment it was hysterical. We all stood there and laughed and until our sides hurt.”
Surprise ending
Chris Deile wrote in to tell of another sort of chilling on-the-ground experience.
“While hiking the Cleveland Way across the North York Moors of England, a ‘roak’ descended on my tent around 2 a.m. A roak is a heavy blanket of fog that carries extreme moisture. Even with a rain sheet covering the tent, everything became thoroughly soaked in minutes.
“The very wet, damp cold made it impossible to sleep. Was forced to pack my gear and hike into nearest village where I lay on a bench in wet clothing (avoiding the even colder ground) in a futile attempt to stay warm until the village livened up.
“Must have been a foreshadowing of future homelessness after returning to the United States.”
Deile gave his address as General Delivery, Spokane, WA 99210.