The Family that Backpacks Together: A Generational Outdoor Story From Salon

Participation in outdoor activities like hunting, fishing & backpacking is falling, and one of the reasons bandied about is the lack of generational support. In other words, if your parents don’t introduce you to the outdoors, chances are you won’t go there — and your kids won’t either.

That’s why — on the heels of our Family Glamping Nightmare Post — this well-written piece on the Salon site (by Gary Kamiya) caught my eye; it’s about a man who caught the outdoor bug after it seemingly skipped a generation in his family. Great stuff:

My grandfather first went to Buck Lake, in California’s Emigrant Wilderness, just north of Yosemite, in 1937. He and his buddies hiked 16 miles to the lake (his pals rode horses part of the way, but he insisted on walking) and spent a week or two fly-fishing, telling tall tales and having a great old time. Grandpa’s Buck Lake trips went on for 30 years, until he was in his 70s, and became a part of my family’s lore. Grandpa was born in 1894, and he remembered a horse-drawn wagon trip he and his family took across Northern California as the great adventure of his life. He started delivering the mail on a rural route in a horse-drawn buggy. He was part of that single, remarkable generation of Americans who went from growing up in an agrarian-dominated society before cars — a life in many ways little different from that of a medieval peasant — to witnessing the moon landing.

Later in the piece, we read this:

But the Buck Lake tradition didn’t die. Grandpa never took his own children there, but David decided to revive the expeditions. He organized a backpack with his two sons and two of his nephews, my cousin Jonathan and me. We hiked in and had a glorious time. That was 32 years ago, and various combinations of the clan have been going in ever since.

You can read the entire article here. It instantly made me nostalgic for the Fall camping/backpacking get-together featuring my three other brothers. On the surface, it was a chance to reconnect our somewhat far flung lives, but in truth, there was always something far more interesting (and revealing) going on. Time for it to happen again, eh?

See you in the wilderness, Tom Chandler.

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