CAMPING IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE

Recently a friend invited me on a camping trip up to Scott Lake, which is about 15 miles up the old McKenzie Highway over 4000 feet in elevation.    It has been a few years since my last camp out and much of my camping gear is old, like me.  I looked forward to getting back up in the high mountains to enjoy the solitude of nature, a campfire and boiling up a pot of coffee in the morning.    Most campgrounds require reservations and payment in advance online these days.   This campground required no reservations and picking out a campsites was based on first come, first get with a fee of $5 per car.    After picking out two campsites we went back to pay the fees thinking there were envelopes to deposit the money in and take the receipt back to put in the car windows to show that we paid.    To our surprise it required an app on our smart phones to scan the campground code.   Being out of range of a signal to the internet a sign was posted stating it would download the payment once we had a signal again.   We were unable to get any of this to work on our smart phones and figured that nobody would be checking on us this time of year.   There was no campground host and nobody showed up to check for receipts.  I guess we cheated the government out of $10.  

Now about that old camping equipment, especially my old backpacking mummy sleeping bag of 40 plus years that was to keep me warm down to 20 degrees below zero.  It didn't work, I was cold all night, even with flannel pajamas on and a wool hat.  Later I was told the down in those old bags becomes less effective over time.  I guess the time had run out of my old bag.   Then I got thinking back on when Celia and I slept in two full-size sleeping bags zipped together and how warm we were, especially with two warm bodies in the same bag, sometime we got too hot!    One thing for sure is that coffee still taste good in the early morning mountain air and those Canada Jays or camp robbers are still around to pick up any morsel that may fall to the ground.