Camping

The human story of camping is older than the word itself. For most of our species' existence, sleeping under the open sky was not leisure but necessity — a nightly act of survival repeated for hundreds of thousands of years. The shift from necessity to choice is what turned camping into a hobby.

That turn arrived in the late 19th century. In 1861, a Connecticut teacher named Frederick Gunn took his students into the wilderness for two weeks of sleeping in straw-filled sheds — widely cited as the first organized recreational camp in America. Across the Atlantic, the British tailor Thomas Hiram Holding — who had spent his childhood traveling the American frontier in a covered wagon — published *The Camper's Handbook* in 1908, codifying lightweight tent design and portable cookery for a generation newly curious about sleeping outdoors on purpose.

The early 20th century made camping democratic. The Boy Scouts, founded in 1910, taught millions of American boys to pitch a tent, build a fire, and read the stars. The National Park Service, established in 1916, created a network of public lands where a family could reserve a plot for a dollar a night. By the 1920s, the automobile had put the wilderness within a weekend's reach, and roadside campgrounds sprouted along every new highway.

The postwar boom turned camping into a national ritual. Returning GIs, the GI Bill, and the interstate highway system converged: by 1962, nearly 20 million Americans camped each year. The gear evolved from heavy canvas and cast iron to nylon, aluminum, and down — lighter, warmer, and built for the backcountry. The 1960s and 70s saw the rise of technical backpacking, led by companies like Sierra Designs and The North Face, who reimagined the sleeping bag, the tent, and the pack as engineered systems rather than improvised shelter.

Today, camping occupies a unique place in the Gen X imagination. For the generation that came of age between the campfire and the smartphone, it is the last reliable way to disconnect — a deliberate act of slowness in a world that never stops. Whether it is a car-camping weekend with a cooler and a canopy, or a solo backpacking trip into a designated wilderness area, the ritual is the same: you carry what you need, you build a temporary home, and you let the night be darker than the one you left behind.