Lately I’ve noticed a spate of “Let’s go camping” articles in the national news media, especially after about June when many realized the COVID-19 pandemic would last far into 2021.
This plethora of predictable paeans to beautiful nature and outdoor camping was meant to persuade more Americans to rush into the sun with their children and walk around/ski/fish/explore and roam about afoot — excellent ideas and helpful to the semi-quarantined audience of couch-crazed humans.
Yet, some of these surprising hosannas to the forests and the sea come from writers who normally tout expensive Caribbean diving or Rhine River cruising trips, or ski packages to Telluride or Mammoth Lakes.
We enter a debate here over the complicated terms “camping” and “backpacking,” which are often confused with glamping and cheap travel in other lands.
I’ve consistently written about inexpensive local hiking choices since 2012, and with guru Franko’s and Mr. C’s companionship, I’ve been exploring our stunning Santa Barbara County backcountry since the early 1970s.
I never use horses, so backpacking has always meant walking with a load on the back. Hiking has been the only locomotion choice possible for longer overnight ventures back to the Sisquoc River or along the upper Manzana.
Moving entirely on foot fits the “paleo” model I’ve been following, thinking of Ishi and Australian aboriginal peoples without horses or any beasts of burden. They had no cars, ATVs or airplanes. Here in North America, they didn’t have horses until after 1500 C.E. (brought in by the conquistadores).
When a CNN Travel piece came out online Dec. 31, the headline captured my interest (after all, this column is called On The Trail): “Backpacking is a rite of passage for many travelers. COVID could end it forever.”
Imagine my confusion when I realized the article was written from a global perspective, and writer Tamara Hardingham-Gill defines “backpacking” as traveling light and on the cheap (for the young, mainly), and inevitably begins as an airplane flight!
My spouse and I have also practiced this kind of international travel with our Kelty backpacks — in 1971, the aluminum tubes got stuck in a Heathrow baggage ramp, clogging the system and leading authorities to scream at us. Little did they know that the onslaught of “backpackers” had just begun.
Admiring the simple lifestyle ideals of the “Paleo” movement — in food, in culture, in travel — backcountry backpacking can be seen as another effort to slow down, hike moderately while savoring the landscape and avoiding cars and planes.
OK, although clearly impossible to go full Paleo these days, perhaps it’s best to adopt the view that half the apple is better than none; thus, my backcountry backpacking is mostly “paleo” when I walk “away” from our coronavirus-distressed civilization down a forest path.
I do choose to follow this completely bipedal walking regimen, and I head outside on foot at every possible opportunity.
When I fell into teaching at a local private school despite my complete background in public education, I found out that the little school kept up an active outdoor program tradition well into this 21st century.
As an unintended consequence, I found myself participating in hikes and backpacking treks to fantastic locales with bands of eager adolescents. We hiked in Death Valley, Yosemite, Santa Cruz Island, and also my beloved local nature gems like Figueroa Mountain, Nineteen Oaks, Lost Valley, Davy Brown and Nira Camps. Always walking.
I received the inspiration to lead these hikes from several sources, including Frank Van Schaick’s example, and his 1994 outdoor education book, Home of the Wilson Wildcats. More frequent school forays went up Rattlesnake Canyon Trail or Coldwater Canyon for a few hours roaming in the adjacent chaparral shrublands.
These excursions with my school, along with Van’s words, introduced me to California hiking in areas I’d never have figured out — these all came after I’d (internationally) “backpacked” through Western Europe beginning in London (1971).
Thus, there are really two sorts of “backpacking,” and they are very different.
The prolonged and terrifying pandemic encloses us all indoors, and now we read this recent flood of “encouraging” articles challenging us to “backpack” and get outside.
In the CNN piece, the author even claimed her “backpacking” was a rite of passage for the young, and perhaps so, but backcountry camping is a lot closer to an authentic nature experience than hustling through Europe carrying an urban backpack and staying at hostels.
My columns focus on hiking local trails, and such opportunities abound along the backcountry near the South Coast.
As outlined in an earlier column, I envision four levels of my sort of camping. By far the most rewarding groupings are levels three and four in which you head out on your own, lugging your own supplies on your back, and camp away from your vehicle wherever you choose in actual wilderness (e.g. Sycamore Camp on the Sisquoc).
Yes, I do drive my 4-cylinder gas-powered truck to the trailheads, but when flying once a year to Germany for family visits, I don’t call these travels “backpacks.”
In my backpacking, I also refrain from carrying a cell phone or a firearm, together two of humanity’s worst inventions. But I do tote freeze-dried food, a tiny gas stove and a space-age sleeping bag, thus revealing my debts to advanced civilization.
These long dayhikes and backpacking trips bring up this query: Why keep going back there again and again?
These are those “eternal returns” to deep nature I fell into with my adolescent students, and witnessing the heavy positive impact on these youngsters also teaches adults about the healing properties of nature explorations. Today, local backpacking and car camping help us escape from our Anthropocene era’s novel “Enclosure” movement caused by COVID-19; yet, the fear of the outdoors began long before 2020.
Even as we keep most schools closed, we’re realizing how extremely necessary going outside has become: Study the kids. In Germany, where I have young grandsons, Chancellor Angela Merkel has kept public schools mostly open because Germans accept that children absolutely need face-to-face school.
In the lightweight CNN piece, the author writes about the “Asia Trail” hippies who backpacked across the Middle East, noting, “The popularity of the trail led to the publication of the first Lonely Planet guidebook, Across Asia on the Cheap, in 1973.”
My partner and I were never that audacious, but we did hitchhike from Munich through then-Yugoslavia down to Athens and back with our backpacks, and slept on a ship’s deck across the Mediterranean to glorious Crete in 1972, before Lonely Planet got going and invented the genre of “international backpacking” (sic).
Unlike the subtitle of Hardingham-Gill’s article, COVID-19 has not ended the more legitimate nature “backpacking” practiced in the American West, and the young do not have to miss this crucial rite of passage. Long nature dayhikes and local backpacking treks are ideal activities during a pandemic, as I’ve preached in several columns.
On Dec. 19, my posse and I hiked around the startling West Hurricane Deck area, taking all day and returning full of juvenescence and relief (always masked while riding together in vehicles with windows partially down).
We spent most of Jan. 2 on an exhilarating six-hour dayhike through Blue Canyon, certainly bearing light “backpacks” but not passing through airports or bus stations, not mingling with crowds and, yes, maintaining some social distancing even while On The Trail.
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» Tamara Hardingham-Gill’s CNN Travel article; F. Van Schaick, Home of the Wilson Wildcats (Capra Press, 1994); Dan McCaslin, “Eternal Backcountry Return” (2018) with maps; Autobiography in the Anthropocene (Lulu.com, 2019).
— Dan McCaslin is the author of Stone Anchors in Antiquity and has written extensively about the local backcountry. His latest book, Autobiography in the Anthropocene, is available at Lulu.com. He serves as an archaeological site steward for the U.S. Forest Service in Los Padres National Forest. He welcomes reader ideas for future Noozhawk columns, and can be reached at cazmania3@gmail.com. Click here to read previous columns. The opinions expressed are his own.