Well, even THAT wouldn’t work, as you note, if the cotton is flame-retardant! Something that’s been washed a bunch of times might well have lost that property, however.
I don’t know that flammability is the main concern there, but simply that plastic coatings work better than wax.
We were at a friend’s place, where they saved the pizza boxes to use to help start the bonfire. Paper, soaked with pizza grease - worked like a charm.
I was amused at the mention of mantel lamps. We actually own one of those - bought 40ish years ago, before a big camping trip. This predated LED lamps of course, the friend who advised us said it would last a lot longer, as a regular battery lantern’s batteries would die too quickly. We knew not to bring it into our tent, of course, but it gave a nice light for the campsite. It’s still in our basement somewhere.
Tents: an old-style canvas tent might hold up better than one a friend bought before a Girl Scout trip. It basically had an “exoskeleton”. You didn’t have to slide poles anywhere; you just popped the thing open and staked it down. Easy peasy.
It collapsed during the night, and she threw it away (the occupants wound up spending the rest of the night in my nearby hotel room!).
And they DO make huge new tents; one of the other families in our troop had one that nominally would sleep 9 people.
Closed cell foam sleeping pads now replaced by therm-a-rests. A nice improvement.
It sort of bugs me when people drag a 30’ trailer to an KOA and call it ‘camping’.
It’s funny, I did a lot of camping through my 20’s and early 30’s. I then moved out of the city to the mountains. My wife and I camped a couple of times, but it became rather pointless.
Best friend and I camped quite a bit. My pack was always ready. Once though, we had set up camp and made a fire. Looking at each other, we where thinking “Well, here we are again” “Yeah. Want to go see a movie?”
We broke camp, drove back to town and saw Airplane!
There’s a manga and anime series called Yuru Camp (or Laid-Back Camp in English). Solidly in the cute girls doing cute things genre, it’s a rather amusing look at camping in more rural Japan. I say more rural because they never wind up at anything other than a developed site. The advice is okay (as are the abbreviated recipes) but really only for the kind of camping where you can never really get in trouble.
Maybe it’s just me, but I feel like the quality of most gear has gone way down as manufacturers send everything overseas.
I’ve always believed that, in the unlikely event I’m ever lost in the woods, I’ll find a stream or river and follow it downstream. Eventually, you’ll run into something – a bridge (and where there are bridges, there are roads, and where there are roads there is help), a town, something.
I read somewhere (don’t remember where) recently that that’s actually bad advice, although I can’t remember why.
“Generally speaking, roads and civilization lie downhill of a mountain, so following a stream downhill can be a smart move. It can also be a dangerous path, however, as the chances of meeting wildlife, or slipping and falling, greatly increase with following a body of water through the forest. If you do decide to follow a stream to civilization, try to stay approximately 100 feet from the stream. This will reduce the chances of meeting wildlife, slipping, or being blocked by cliffs.”
I’ve also thought it was best as a last resort, not just because roads are downstream, but if it’s flowing water, you’re not going to be going in circles.
I hadn’t actually thought about the animals angle. But in any case, due to the slipping reason and not wanting to backtrack if I hit a waterfall, if this happened to me, I would take the easiest looking route that was still in sight of the stream valley, rather than insistently hug the water.
Perhaps more important than either following or not following the stream is to make sure you have a way to backtrack rather than slide or jump down a slope or small cliff which you might not be able to scramble up from.
I still have a mantle lantern that I still use in the “living room” (outdoors) of the camp area since we can’t have campfires. It sits on a pole and casts a nice circle of light for the couple of hours we want it. It also uses the same fuel as my ancient-but-still-working Coleman stove, so there’s that.
Of course, as backup we have all sorts of LED-equIpped flashlights, headlamps, etc.
I always keep matches in a waterproof container anyway (Ain’t plastic great? Talk about things that have revolutionized camping). My everyday carry now includes a rechargable arc lighter and a plastic fresnel lens tucked in my wallet, and in my backpack of actual hiking stuff matches and a firesteel.
“Sucking the poison out of the wound” has always been a bad idea for snakebite treatment. All that’s changed is that now we know that it’s a bad idea.
At least it’s not as bad as “give the victim plenty of alcohol”. Rattlesnakes’ reputation for deadliness is mostly due to that old myth: A healthy adult human bit by a rattlesnake, with no treatment whatsoever, will almost certainly survive, but add alcohol and the situation becomes pretty dire.
One reason I picked up Diana Helmuth’s book How to Suffer Outdoors was to see just how much things had changed since i last camped. Especially in California, you can’t do a lot of the things we took for granted. You can’t necessarily start a campfire anywhere (check to se if you need a permit) so she uses a camp stove. Bury your poop and pack out used wipes. Tents, ass noted above, have undergone astonishing changes not only since my boy scout says (I defy anyone to pack out one of our heavy canvas tents), but even since the lightweight nylon tents with bungee-corded tentpoles I last used – modern tents are whisper-thin and light.
All that stuff I learned about digging pit latrines and washing up after meals and building a Hunter’s Fire is pretty much obsolete these days.
I don’t know what your use case is, but my early 90s Sierra Designs Pharoah is still going strong, if a little musty. I dropped my motorcycle on it once and didn’t break a pole. I’ve carried a splint kit and have used it never.
I’ve only replaced it because I got a new, smaller backpack and the Pharoah doesn’t fit well. A more modern REI tent packs smaller, weighs less and ventilates better. I see no reason that this won’t likely be second only and last tent. At this rate, I’ll be in my 80s when I next need a new tent, and being honest, I don’t see myself in that market then.
In terms of other obsolete advice, I dug out my battered copy of my backpacking bible, The Complete Walker (probably the 1984 edition) because my wife wanted some trekking advice.
That was really a time capsule, already trending out of date by the early 90s. As others have mentioned, one of the changes I’ve just internalized is the ‘pack it out’ mentality vs ‘bury your TP’. I was hiking last weekend and found a spot where used TP was strewn about and realized I had not seen that in quite a while. Now it’s much more minimal volume. A backcountry bidet and a wet wipe replace a bunch of TP for me.
Yeah, the basic problem is that the “wilderness” is more like Central Park, unless you’re taking a float plane to somewhere in the Canadian north woods.
Since your avatar shows us a picture of your motorcycle, I’m just amazed you could pick that thing up high enough to drop it on the tent.
I’ll invite you camping some time. You can lift a 15 cu. ft. boulder out of the way and we’ll build our campfire in the resulting divot.
Seriously, though, I figure if my strike-on-the-box matches get too wet, I’ll still have my shoelaces and know how to make and use a bow-drill to start a friction-fire. It’s really not that difficult and it uses tools that are already on-hand for other purposes. Combined with the parafin from the lip balm I tend to carry when hiking anyway, a fire will come easily.
Packed away with my if-I-ever-go-camping-again stuff is a Coleman lantern with the irradiated mantle. I had forgotten about that. I think you guys are right that it’s time for me to ditch that for a modern LED lamp that is just as bright, safer to handle, and can be brought inside the tent without concern.
You have actually done it before? In my experience until one has actually done something, you only think you know how.
One thing that helps enormously: you don’t rock’n’roll at first because you’re not trying to light an ember yet, you’re trying to build up a pile of ground wood dust. Save your strength until you have that, then you go for friction heat.
The backup firestarter I prefer (in addition to the matches that are always in my pocket every day) is a page-sized Fresnel lens. Those never run out, and they don’t weigh much.
