Camping skills are survival skills. While I understood this intellectually, I didn’t know it until Winter Storm Landon hit the Hudson Valley and knocked out my power for 40 hours.
Native New Englanders, my wife and I are no strangers to harsh winter weather, but this storm caught us off guard. We went to bed expecting a wintry mix of ice and rain and woke up to a world encased in ice, the trees frosted silver and bending under the weight of more than half an inch of radial ice.
Like over 40 million Americans, I rely on well water. Since my well is powered by an electric pump, the power outage cut off our water supply, too.
My wife and I put on long underwear, wool sweaters, and a second pair of socks. We gathered our solar-powered lanterns, gas-powered stove, backup butane canisters, and 5-gallon water cube from the garage.
Then we unearthed our car from a sheet of ice and drove to a nearby natural spring to get water.
Returning home, we settled on the sofa under a pile of blankets, made hot tea, and put our perishables in a cooler and stuck it outside. We took periodic trips to the car to warm up in the heat and recharge our phones, which we used to reassure relatives and check in with friends
It was the worst ice storm in over a decade. Over 46,000 people in my county lost power. Central Hudson, our electric company, would ultimately call in a crew of almost 1,000 linemen and tree professionals, bringing in workers from Pennsylvania, Indiana, and upstate New York in an effort to restore power to as many residents as possible in an efficient manner.
As night fell, we made boxed mac and cheese on the camp stove, tucked out sleeping bags under our down comforter, and piled into bed to read by solar lantern.
We woke up, made hot cereal and more tea, and took a drive to the mall to pick up dry ice and bottled water.
This necessitated passing between downed power lines and fallen trees. Roads that had been passable closed as more trees fell. Work crews and bucket trucks passed our house attending to some of the 770 outages and more than 2,000 downed power lines caused by Winter Storm Landon.
We packed up to visit a friend with a wood stove, but she called to recant the invitation after a bout of food poisoning.
We drove around, warming up and checking out the road to the highway. Temperatures were forecast to drop below freezing that night; temperatures inside our house were down to 43 degrees. Our power was supposed to be restored by 8 p.m. but if it wasn’t, we planned to drive out. We wanted to make sure the road was passable while it was still light.
Our power was restored at 7 p.m. An hour later, we were warm and freshly showered, relieved we hadn’t had to choose between a crowded warming shelter and a two-hour drive to relatives in Connecticut.
Our camping equipment and skills helped us make the best of a difficult, potentially dangerous situation.
While my wife and I had camped once or twice, we didn’t take up camping with any seriousness until 2020, when it became the safest way to vacation.
“I will never use this again. This is such a waste,” I remember thinking when we purchased the 5-gallon water cube because the primitive campground we booked, outside Acadia National Park, lacked running water.
“Do I really need this?” I asked myself about a camping-related impulse buy of solar-powered string lights.
Emboldened by our Acadia getaway, we planned a car camping road trip to Michigan, then a second to Kentucky, investing in new gear to make our nights of outdoor sleeping more pleasant. I questioned every new purchase: Did we really need it? Would we use the item often enough to justify the expense? Say, more than once?
What seemed a simple question of cost was really one of access.
I questioned whether these purchases were “worth it” because I struggled to see myself outdoors—this despite moving to a rural area, buying passes to a local hiking spot, and purchasing kayaking gear to paddle the Hudson River.
Beginning in childhood, women are discouraged from outdoor adventures.
This happens in subtle and overt ways: adventure books that feature brave boys and not girls; parenting styles that reinforce outdoor play as a boys’ activity, such that 16 percent fewer preschool girls play outdoors with parents; horror movie tropes like Don’t Go in the Woods, in which women are punished for outdoor adventures; society’s obsession with true crime cases in which women who venture outdoors never make it back, be they pretty white women like Gabby Petito or indigenous women, who go missing at far higher rates—5,712 in 2016 alone, according to the National Crime Information Center—and receive far less media attention.
In their Outdoor Participation Trends Report 2021, the Outdoor Industry Association (OIA) laments that the number of women who take part in outdoor activities has held steady for eight years at 46 percent of total participants. Since women make up 51 percent of the population, there’s a persistent gender gap in outdoor activities like camping.
OIA’s survey, like many others, ignores the subset of LGBTQ Americans who don’t identify with binary gender, a demographic that is simultaneously invisible to the outdoor industry and disproportionately vulnerable to micro aggression and harassment when we take up space outdoors, as Lucy Parks writes in Outside.
And while there have been important gains, disparities in outdoor access continue to exist among BIPOC individuals, who receive societal messaging that wilderness spaces aren’t for them.
While lack of interest may of course keep many women from pursuing outdoor hobbies, I suspect that many who would be interested in these adventures don’t seek them out because they don’t see themselves represented, and because of concerns for their safety. This was certainly the case for me, and a 2017 survey of 2,100 active women by Outside magazine confirms I’m far from the only one with these concerns.
Fifty-three percent of women told Outside they’d been sexually harassed by men while outdoors: catcalled, followed, flashed (this has happened to me) or directly attacked. Sixty-six percent of women felt afraid when outdoors, with assault or harassment from men being the top fear for more than one-third of adventurous women.
Twin worries for my safety as a woman and my vulnerability as a gender nonconforming queer person kept me from claiming space outdoors for far too long. It took a public health crisis for camping to seem like the safest possible travel option for two queer women, and thus for me to invest in the camping equipment and skills that helped my wife and I endure a difficult and potentially dangerous situation. These concerns keep other women from confidence-building outdoor adventures and from the skills and equipment that could, if not save a life, at least make life’s hardships more endurable.
I wrote this post about the need for camping skills among women and gender expansive folks a couple of years back and recently found it in my drafts. I’ve decided to share it as another wave of severe winter weather leaves people in many states without heat. Ultimately, camping skills help provide knowledge and equipment to weather storms like the one I experienced, which may increase due to climate change.
I’d love to hear from you in the comments: When have your camping skills helped you through a difficult experience? What did you learn from it?
