Camping Is a Generational Trademark

Every family has a trademark. Not a logo. A habit, something you did enough times that your kids end up doing it, mostly because you did it.

Outdoor families stay outdoor families. A kid who got taken camping grows up and takes somebody camping thirty years later without ever really deciding to. Which is a pretty great thing to be handed for free! And you inherit two things from that, not one. You inherit wanting to go, and you also inherit knowing how. Which knots hold. How far from the tent to hang the food. That it gets shockingly cold at four in the morning in October.

It runs the other way too. If nobody ever took you, my guess is nobody takes your kids either, and not because anybody sat down and decided against it.

So this is a post about going camping when you have never been camping and do not own a single piece of gear.

The gear problem

A single mom wants to be the best mom she can be. That part is not in question. What she may not have is any of the history that would make her comfortable setting a camp up, and worse than that, she has no idea where to even start buying the stuff.

She is not standing in that aisle wondering whether her kids will like it. She is wondering which tent, and whether the cheap sleeping bags are a mistake, and how much of this ends up in the garage forever. Real money on equipment for something she might do exactly once, with a good chance of getting it wrong on the first try. She can run that math in about four seconds and the answer is no.

The answer she needs is that she buys nothing at all, which is how this actually works. I will get to that. There is a second family with the opposite problem and they end up in the same place anyway.

Why the outdoorsy family ends up at a resort

Now take the opposite family. Ridiculously outdoorsy, garage full of it, knows exactly what they are doing.

They still are not checking a tent and four sleeping bags onto a plane, renting the big car so it all fits, flying across the country to go get that car, and then driving another three hours to the campsite. Nobody wants to spend a week of vacation doing that.

So they book the big “all inclusive” place instead, and honestly the resort has a real argument here. It is easy. One price, nothing to carry, somebody else’s problem if it rains, and your kids are handled from the minute you walk in. That is worth a lot and I am not going to pretend it isn’t.

Then you get home and the chlorine smell is still in your hair a week later.

That’s just not the way it should be. We should get to be outside whenever we want, as a byproduct of being a person in the actual world, and without first having to “figure it all out.”

What actually gets set up

So, plainly. A local concierge, basically somebody who lives where you are camping and is assigned to your trip, sets the entire camp up before you get there, then comes back and packs all of it out after you leave. You are not there for either end of that.

Do you need gear? No. Bring clothes and food.

There are two versions of it. The glamping one is a furnished safari tent, so hard walls and a real floor, with a bed, a stocked kitchen, and its own attached bathroom with a hot shower, standing and staged before you pull in. The camping one is the traditional version brought to you: a proper tent pitched, sleeping kit, camp kitchen, table and chairs. Everything most people haul, already there.

Where you can actually do this

“Here” should not be a single place, and that is the part I care about most.

Right now one of them is Summit and Sage outside Durango, which has its own stretch of the Animas River on it! You can also search campgrounds anywhere in the country and get our own sites, federal campgrounds and private ones back in one list, ranked by how far each one is from you.

And if you already booked a campsite yourself, on Recreation.gov or straight with a campground, we can come set camp up on that one instead. That has a catch. It only works where one of our people lives close enough to get there, and today that is a short list. It gets longer as we add people, and I would rather say that now than have you find it out at checkout.

Get here, explore, have fun, leave. That should be the whole list of requirements, and none of the four takes any practice.

So what is your family’s trademark going to be? Fishing, skiing, the same lake every August, one specific gas station in Nebraska. Somebody started each of those on purpose and almost certainly never announced it at the time. Might as well be you.