From the category archives:

Camping Connection

Camping Connection – It’s a Tent…It’s a Cabin…No, It’s a…Yurt?

Story and photos by Bill Steiden
Perhaps the best way to describe a yurt, for the uninitiated, is as the halfway point between a tent and a house.
Appropriately, it was invented by people who needed a home but had no permanent dwelling place.
They were Central Asian herders following their animals across arid grasslands to seasonal pastures. [...]

Read Full Article >>

Camping Connection – From Natural Disasters to Natural Beauties

By Bill Steiden
A vast, open field at a mile’s elevation in North Carolina, bisected by a tumbling river and surrounded by green peaks.
A languid lake filled with the drowned corpses of a great cypress forest in a lonely corner of northwestern Tennessee.
Another lake, like a giant azure eye, winking from its high cauldron at the [...]

Read Full Article >>

Camping Connection – Time for the Eastern and Western Flower Shows

By Bill Steiden
An old saying has it that love is like wildflowers, often found in the most unlikely places. The truth behind that truism is illustrated by two classic camping spots on opposite sides of the country that, in their respective seasons, reward outdoor lovers with what are among the best flower shows on the [...]

Read Full Article >>

Camping Connection – Florida’s Flatwater

By Bill Steiden
The popular image of canoeing is eternally linked with 1972’s Deliverance – four men shooting deadly Class V rapids on a wild, remote river in wooden canoes. And that wasn’t the riskiest part of their adventure.

But nowadays, the backwoods folks are in the tourist trade, and they’ll tell you that kind of river-running [...]

Read Full Article >>

Camping Connection – Small & Stylish, Teardrops Are Worth a Look

By Bill Steiden
There’s a good reason Elkhart, Ind., is the epicenter of U.S. unemployment. It’s the capital of recreational vehicle manufacturing at a time when spending on luxury items, such as RVs, is declining fast, and fuel prices are in flux after reaching record levels in 2008.
Yet as the RV industry’s teardrops fall, they’re on [...]

Read Full Article >>

Camping Connection – When the Twinkling Lights Are City Lights

By Bill Steiden
One of the big draws for most who go camping is a change in surroundings from our workaday urban or suburban world. We want to see trees, streams, fields, mountains – something other than cars and concrete to break the routine of our lives.
Yet a pair of unique camping destinations, one in the [...]

Read Full Article >>

Camping Connection – The Devil in the Ozarks

By Chris Reinolds
Tucked away in the northwest corner of Arkansas, Devil’s Den State Park is a wonderland of hiking, backpacking, spelunking and other outdoor delights. Lee Creek Valley, where the park is located, is set in the ancient sedimentary mountains renowned for their natural beauty and lush oak-hickory forest.
Geologists believe that, between 10,000 and 70,000 [...]

Read Full Article >>

Camping Connection – National Park Alternatives

By Bill Steiden
America’s national parks are due for a celebration. The first, Yellowstone, was declared in 1872, and it was President Woodrow Wilson who established the National Park Service in 1916. But President Theodore Roosevelt, whose term in office ended one hundred years ago this year, gets the credit for building the backbone of what [...]

Read Full Article >>

Camping Connection – The Very First National Seashore

Story and photos by Bill Steiden
A little less than fifty years ago, a bridge opened across the Outer Banks’ Oregon Inlet, connecting North Carolina’s Roanoke and Hatteras islands. That could have been the ruination of the most pristine coastline in the Southeast.
Just as on many of Florida’s barrier islands, easy automotive access threatened to sow [...]

Read Full Article >>

Camping Connection – A New England Experience Where?

By Bill Steiden
A rocky-shored island with granite cliffs and gravelly beaches in a northern clime, surrounded by sailboat-studded blue waters; a summer resort set in a Victorian village, accessible by ferry and steeped in history.
Martha’s Vineyard, right?
Actually, Ohio.
South Bass Island is part of a chain extending from Ohio’s Marblehead Peninsula to Ontario’s Point Pelee that [...]

Read Full Article >>

← Previous Entries