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My First Camping Partner: My Dad (RIP)

What’s your first memory of camping? There’s a good chance that it’s a memory from your childhood, a camping trip with your family. It’s not lost on me that I am very lucky to tell you I had been camping in Joshua Tree, Yosemite, Yellowstone, Mono Lake, Bryce Canyon and the Grand Canyon by the time I was 10 years old. My parents – my dad led the charge – took nine (nine!) kids to national parks for summer vacation every year. When we moved East, we eventually made it everywhere from Acadia to the Everglades.

While ours was the typical drive-the-motor-home-to-the-sign-and-take-a-picture family, it was these camping beginnings that set me on my way to outdoor adventure sports in adulthood. When my dad and I took a trip to Alaska together, he lost 11 pounds without trying – I was an adult by then and insisted on actually mountain biking and hiking.

I don’t need to tell you – though I have in many of these pages – the benefits of outdoor adventure sports. The importance of skills a young girl learns camping, from navigation to preparedness (“What’s the Boy Scout motto? Be prepared!” my dad would all too often say to me) is hard to measure.

Plus, it’s all just plain fun. My dad lived to be 90 years old and he enjoyed his life. As just one example of how long he lived and how much fun he had, he took a trip with friends to Glen Canyon before the Glen Canyon Dam flooded it with Lake Powell. He died this month and it was hard to be too sad – a long life, fully lived is a thing to rejoice. My own tribute to him will be to take kids camping and pay it forward. I hope you’ll do the same this summer.

Comments

Eric Stephenson said…
What a great post. It sounds like you had a wonderful dad and made some really amazing memories on those camping trips. My condolences on his passing!
Anonymous said…
Thank you for sharing your memories, its so nice to read about having a great dad/family. Thank you once again. Keep talking about loved ones!!

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