Camping in Yellowstone
What we've done thanks to good men and fathers
Henry David Thoreau, in his transcendentalist treatise Walden, wrote the following words that have become famous. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.” If I read this to my husband, I can just see Jon giving me his expressionless-why-are-you-telling-me-this look. Then he’d probably completely change the subject, like telling me about a secondhand car we should look at.
Jon wouldn’t do this because he doesn’t respect significant American literature. He’d do this because he’s a man who tends to spend more time doing things than talking about them. The obvious exception, of course, has to do with theology, which you know already if you’ve been reading here for awhile. But even that’s not fair, since he’s currently reading a book on the brain, keeps buying and ingesting books on history and culture, and has spent nearly two decades talking with me about countless subjects (as I edited this for the last time, he wandered in from grilling outside and told me about yet another book he’s reading and why another man we both know should read it).
At any rate, Jon still operates like most men. Last Sunday, on Father’s Day, our longtime friend Gary who was visiting with his lovely wife Carmen went to church and Bible class with all of us. In the afternoon, Gary wanted to go swimming. This was awesome for our family of eight kids, but Gary also legitimately wanted to enjoy the water and the sun, while taking our daughter who is his goddaughter around the lazy river and holding the baby so I could jump in for a minute. Jon spent time playing water volleyball with at least half of our kids, plus ones we didn’t know. Then we went to Pizza Ranch—or Chicken Ranch, depending on what you prefer—and ate way too much food than was good for us. But it was what the men wanted, to do something fun outside and to nosh on yummy eats. Unsurprisingly, we all enjoyed it.
I was thinking all that day that Father’s Day always seems a little bit like a throwaway holiday. It’s not an actual holy day, as much as we might love and respect the men who raised us, just as Mother’s Day isn’t a religious festival either. Father’s Day feels particularly perfunctory, after all the hoopla in May that moms get. It’s kind of like the kid who gets put on a sandlot team out of pity. “You want to play? Okay, sure. Left field is open.” What everyone really wants is to get on with the actual game.
This is a shame, but not because a made-up holiday deserves more credit. It’s because fathers are so incredibly vital to us. They are the game, the way kids and moms and other people around us make up the most of life’s most precious blessings. Only the willfully blind would try to assert that fathers are superfluous or mere accouterments to a flourishing and full life, and sadly, there are many more willfully blind among us than is good for our culture. Just listen to this podcast from the children’s rights organization Them Before Us. Dr. Warren Farrell, a longtime expert on boys and men, points out the obvious point that many children now do not live with their biological fathers, and this is a root cause of many other problems in our society. We need real men who are good fathers to teach us and guide us and love us so we can do hard things and, in turn, teach and guide and love others, too.
And this brings me back to the woods, and to camping.
I didn’t grow up camping. My idea of roughing it was to pack a backpack of water and mostly highly processed snacks and wander out in the woods behind our house with my two siblings for an hour or two before returning, sweaty and triumphant, to air conditioning, Mom, and the comforts of modern civilization.
But my dad camped with my brother. They both disappeared for a weekend every year and came back dirty, smelly, and invigorated by their manly bonding. Camping in the great outdoors connected them in a unique way, though I wasn’t sold on the experience, as my liking for running water and indoor plumbing (and my dislike for dirt and spiders) trumped my desire for adventure.
My husband grew up camping, too. Jon actually went with his whole family when he was a kid—his parents, his younger sister, and him. It’s been a running joke in our marriage that his idea of selling the idea of outdoor overnight adventure in the wilderness is to say something like this:
“When I was growing up, we went camping.” Jon says this as jovially as is possible with him, which considering that he’s of German and Norwegian descent, isn’t very. Then he’d really lay on the, um, sugar. “Every time we went, it rained. The tent leaked. Somebody always got sick. We’d be yelling at each other most of the time because we were cold and miserable.” And then he’d conclude without irony: “It was great.”
You can understand why underwhelmed scarcely touches how this description has affected me over the years.
Nevertheless, I did go camping in college with friends, after I met Jon and heard about his childhood escapades in the woods. During our first year of marriage, he and I went with a mentor pastor and his family. And it was fun, but not fun enough to make me want to tackle it again, like on purpose, and just us.
But Jon was patient. Over the years, he smartly allowed the appeal of going with friends to move me, too (code: extra hands! Other people who know what they’re doing! Fun company!). We’ve now ventured out as a family to camp during our marriage. Starting about ten years ago, when we had four small children, Gary and Carmen convinced us to go camping at a state park near where we lived for a few days. They shared their camper space with us, helped us set up our tent and make campfires, and made the meals for us. Yes, all the meals! These incredibly generous and patient friends basically single-handedly prompted our foray into camping, because otherwise all the work involved would’ve been just too much emotional and physical work for me to take on. And Jon was kind enough not to pressure me to try it, or to make promises he couldn’t and wouldn’t keep—like saying something impossible like “I’ll do all the work, honey!” No, instead he said things he fully believed and intended to carry out, like “We can do this. I’ll do a lot. We’ll be together.”
What’s really great is that, after having good times roughing it with Gary and Carm in Minnesota and South Dakota, Jon and I and the kids camped with other friends here in Wyoming. When I say “we” here, I mean 80% Jon and 20% me. I was nine months pregnant and left every night to drive down the mountain to sleep in our bed. It sounds like a joke, but even when hugely pregnant, I actually enjoyed getting out into the wilds, especially—and not in spite of—our children. Jon’s strategy paid off. And in the last few years, we’ve gone full hog. Yep, I’m talking about camping in Yellowstone National Park.
Some of our older kids have gone to America’s best-known park with school groups over the years, staying at a Boy Scout camp back when it was still called the Boy Scouts. But the location of that camp meant the driving was rather horrendous. Yellowstone is huge, if you didn’t know, bigger than the combined sizes of Delaware and Rhode Island. If you want to see more than one beautiful outdoor area, you ironically have to be prepared to be inside a vehicle for significant amounts of time.
After hearing about Jon and the kids’ experiences, I really wanted all of us to visit. But I did not want to spend A) insane amounts of money at in-park hotels or cabins or B) insane hours stuck in the van to see different parts of this amazing natural environment. The answer? Tent camping, in the park. $33 a night, plus some fees (of course).
In 2022, we stayed at Grant Campground in the southern part of the park, on Yellowstone Lake. In 2023, we stayed at Madison Campground in the west. This year, we’re taking a break from Yellowstone to do other travel to the east coast. But I’m already dreaming about next year, when I’m hoping we can camp at Canyon Village or Tower Falls and Roosevelt—basically a place where we can more easily get to the northeast part of the park around the Lamar Valley, the only portion we’ve never seen.
Camping with a big family is a lot of work. I make menus weeks ahead of time, prep and package food, make lists and lists and the piles and bins and bags of clothing and items. The van is packed to the gills. The work seems to be too much: can this be worth it?
But oh, it is.
And what I’ve realized is this is in large part due to Gary and Jon.
Gary is a chipper guy, always ready with a joke and a smile. He’s patient with exuberant kids who like to play with tools that are needed with tent building. He also doesn’t get flustered with wrenches thrown into planning, like the time his truck broke down halfway to the Black Hills, and he and Carm had to figure out how to get it fixed and also get to our reserved campsites before our entire trip was over. Aside from them being a day late and having a brand-new rental truck to drive, you’d never know anything had happened to change plans. He still had plenty of fun desserts for the kids (okay, us) to make over the campfire and goofy games to play.
This doesn’t surprise me. One of my favorite Father’s Day memories happened at least a decade ago. Jon was preaching, being a good father to his children and to his flock. I was wrestling with littles in the pew. Gary, who was an elder, came over at one point during the service and said, “Let me take him.” By him Gary meant the clingy son who was going through a terrible I-only-want-Mom phase. Out of sheer desperation, I handed him over. Gary spent the rest of the service—and it was a sizeable portion—walking around the fellowship hall, calmly holding our screaming boy.
One of Jon’s great strengths is that he’s unflappable in less-than-ideal conditions and always willing to do the dirty and difficult jobs. This is absolutely vital in camping. I’m starting to think his family penchant for camping in the rain is at least close to 100% true, at least when it comes to putting up the tent and taking it down. Almost every time we’ve needed to do either, precipitation has appeared, even in very low humidity areas where it hasn’t been raining at all for hours or days beforehand. Last year, after we were stuck in traffic south of Norris Geyser Basin due to bison being on the road, we were almost out of daylight by the time we got to our campsite. Then it started to rain—a fine, near sleet texture that portended snow. Jon stoically got some kids to help him put the tent together and start the fire. When it started raining harder, he stood alone over the Dutch oven, heating up the chili we had for supper while the kids and I tried to get warm in the van. We cheered loudly for him when he climbed in, soaked, with our hot chili.
That same night, Jon woke up several times to make sure our heaters were working and not leaking, since the rain had turned to a light snow (yes, this is not uncommon in Yellowstone in June). In the morning, he was the first one up, making the fire to prepare breakfast while the rest of us huddled under blankets. He washed dishes in freezing water, hauled wood, drove most of the time even when he was exhausted. Our first year, I heard our then one-year-old squawk in the middle of our second night. I’d grabbed him the night before when he’d gotten upset and put him in my sleeping bag, but after that one squawk I heard nothing, so I assumed he’d cried out in his sleep. It was in the morning that I learned Jon had leapt across the tent to snag our son and put him in his sleeping bag so I didn’t have to.
There’s a reason Pa Ingalls would stride off into the prairie to hunt while Ma tended to the domestic space. He had to put himself in danger’s way to provide for his family. While camping, especially with electricity and running water nearby or a short walk away, doesn’t require nearly the same kind of courage and fortitude as pioneer life, it still takes self-sacrifice, initiative, and physical hardships.
In Yellowstone, there’s a variety of landscapes and a wide range of cool and heat, even in the summer. Even in July, when we went in 2022, temperatures get down to the high 40s and low 50s at night. In late June of 2023, light flakes fell as we drove into the East entrance from Cody over the Sylvan Pass on our first evening there. Jon can weather cold, thankfully, and isn’t intimidated by it the way I am (I may have been slightly panicking when I saw the snowflakes and wondered if we’d packed enough layers for the kids).
The truth is, Jon and Gary know what we’ll get when we’re camping.
We’ll get pine trees wafting their subtle scents, towering over our campsites, and sunlight filtering through the cool air. We’ll get kids playing for hours, a made-up tag among the forest behind our tent or baseball in an opening. We’ll get delicious meat and vegetables grilling over the fire after a long day hiking multiple trails. We’ll get time just sitting and breathing. We’ll read actual physical books. We’ll become absolutely filthy as we cook over campfires and stride along dusty trails in the hot sunshine and lug food and coolers to the bear-proof containers. We’ll get to talk about and explore the park and its marvels together.
It really is a wonder, Yellowstone. Jon loves the Grand Canyon best. The innumerable paint pots and geysers and fumaroles are weird and beautiful and so unique to this place, all at the same time; they’re some of my favorites. We’ve all enjoyed spotting wildlife in the Hayden Valley and up by Mammoth Hot Springs, from black bear to elk to bison to many other creatures. The parkitecture is fascinating and literally unique to the place; it revolutionized how other buildings erected in other American national parks were designed.
I’m not sure I could ever go back to Midwest summer camping, with the relentless humidity and oppressive heat, not to mention the mosquitoes, day and night. I also think Yellowstone has spoiled me. I can’t imagine camping in a more beautiful place, where so many incredible vistas and amazing wonders are held.
But the fact is that now, I’d be willing to camp pretty much anywhere Jon would want us to go. Our time together, and what we’ve been able to experience, has been so special to our family. He doesn’t talk about it; he just does. He takes us camping because he believes in our family as a team.
Anthony Esolen writes in his book, No Apologies: Why Civilization Depends on the Strength of Men, writes about the “masculine creation that we may call the team.”
[The] team springs naturally both from the natural strength of the masculine and from its natural propensity for action in the world—both from the arm that can bend the bow and from the arrow of desire that makes a man want to bend it. Consider the economy of nature. It costs the species a lot more, in food and water, to make a male than to make a female. The benefit must then outweigh the cost. It would not outweigh the cost if each man and boy fended for himself, or if the men and boys were mixed indiscriminately with the women and the girls. In either case, most of the males’ additional strength, and pretty much all of their drive to conquer, would be wasted or thwarted. There are all kinds of things you cannot do with babies and small children nearby—such as hunting dangerous or difficult game for the sake of the babies and the small children. …
We do not simply want to add together the strength and the speed of, say, nine men on a baseball diamond, or a hundred men in a Roman military division, or twenty Iroquois men hunting elk. … The male group is not like a chain. It is like a complicated machine or a body. Its actions, not by addition but by clever multiplication, give men the power to do things they could not even conceive of doing otherwise. … [Hunting] cannot be done by adding. It can only be done, if you make the leap, at once conceptual and social, from the individual—however strong and clever he could possibly be on his own—to the team.
Last Sunday, when Gary and Carm were visiting—no camping this time, but still lots of fun—I wished him a happy Father’s Day. “Every day is Father’s Day,” he said easily with his typical grin. He’s right. Dads are dads all days of the year, just as moms are moms. And it was typical of him and Jon, like most men and good fathers, to not want a lot of fuss and attention on Sunday. They’re ultimately team players, after all.
Of course they are. They’ve taken the leap, and they’ve taken us into the woods to live, and to camp.
I love to camp. Enjoyed your stories.
Enjoyed all of this! We are planning to go camping with our 4, 3, and 1 year old boys this summer - and my brother and his wife.... for extra hands and company. :)