Camping Stories

My dad, younger brother, a family friend, and I had rented two canoes for a week and set off on a weeklong canoe-and-portage journey through the marvelous Killarney Park lake system in central Ontario. It had been hard work, but beautiful, camping by the water, eating freeze-dried food by a campfire, and each having an evening tot of Ballentine’s Scotch whisky as we watched the stars emerge. Gliding along a river or lake...

Camping. Love it or hate it, it sucks. Rainy tent erection. Sucks. Boisterous drunken neighbours. Sucks. Mosquitoes. Every single one of them sucks. What doesn’t suck are the shared lasting memories that are both measurable and immeasurable. The indelible ties that bind. The best of which involve firsts. This year, in the shadow and under the stars of our glorious Rocky Mountains, we shared a beer. And not just any beer,...

The troop of boy scouts was going out on a camping trip for the weekend. It would be fun, surely. Ricky was a second class scout and was participating. Unfortunately, his family was not wealthy. Not even close. So he would sometimes not have the gear necessary for these camping trips. This time it was a sleeping bag that he would not be able to supply. The troop had its own tents, so everyone would be sleeping out of the...

I've spent more than two years of my life living in a tent, but less than three. I figured it all up once, but I forgot. My grandpa was a tribal cop who camped at the gate leading to the sacred sites during the summer months when the snow didn't guard the ancestral graves from robbers. A bottle of A1 steak sauce had broken over the square white canvas tent we stayed in, and I'm not a fan of A1 to this day. A bear wandered...

When I was younger, my family and I would go camping almost every year- and I don't mean just me, my brother and my parents either. We brought two of my four cousins along with us when they could make it over from Wyoming. One year, we took a different vehicle than every other time, so we didn't have room for my eldest cousin in any of the seats. He ended up in the trunk. At first, he was quite okay with it, nice and comf...

“You girls have work to do.” The six Girl Guides reluctantly sloped away from the fence that separated our pitch from the neighbouring one where a group of scouts kicked a football about. They walked past me to the QM tent where I was about to set them preparing lunch and one of them, Gemma, shot me a glare. “You won’t be giving me that look when those boys start giving you trouble.” I handed her a loaf of bread and some...