101 Camping Out Ideas & Activities

Even though the cities grow larger and larger and our natural playgrounds get continually smaller, even though everyone has at his disposal switches and faucets which produce light, water, heat, music, and entertainment, and even though the police protect us from burglars and bad neighbors and the firemen keep us from burning up—there still remains one area where we are completely dependent upon ourselves, a place where the laws of the prairie rule, where the enemy lurks, where we have to live like Robinson Crusoe or the Swiss Family Robinson, where we are on the warpath like the Sioux on the Little Big Horn River or the Apaches from Salt River Canyon once were. This place is the camping ground.

Wherever you live, you can find your own place to camp out. It might be a forested wilderness, but it needn't be. A park, a public picnic area—even your own back yard—can be transformed into a deserted island or Robin Hood's glen, and when you go farther afield, during summer vacation, perhaps, the possibilities are limitless.

In any season or in any weather, your Robinson-trapper-pioneer- redskin life begins there. It is there that you can relive the adven­tures of the last of the Mohicans and blaze your own trails through the wonderful world of the outdoors.

Do you think that playing Indians is not going along with the times ? You're wrong. Even the modern world is still full of people like Sacajawea, the brave Indian woman who guided the Lewis and Clark expedition. Who doesn't remember the gallant crew of the Kon-Tiki, a balsa-wood raft that sailed across the Pacific ? What about the courageous Englishman, William Stanley Moss, and his men ? They parachuted into North Pole territory to see if survivors of a plane wreck could reach the nearest settlements in Greenland across the only usable route, a horrible distance of 600 miles. And there are the Australian aborigines, whose ability to read tracks can shame even a well-trained police troop with all sorts of tech­ nical equipment. There are men like Admiral Byrd, and Albert Schweitzer, and the prospectors searching for uranium in northern Canada , and the technicians, scientists, and merchants for world organizations who help the underdeveloped nations and bring civilization to new areas. The age of pioneers and explorers dependent solely on their own skills for survival is still very much with us.

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