Family camping 101
Published 10:05 pm Saturday, June 25, 2011
This weekend’s family campout at Silver Lake in Everett was a chance to get away without being far away.
The overnight introduction to camping event at Everett’s Thorton A. Sullivan Park was a sellout, with 48 families signing up.
Less than a half mile from busy Highway 527, kids and a
dults were surrounded by towering trees and campsites that looked out over the shimmering lake.
The weather even helped add to the feeling of a textbook Northwest campout, turning skies to a dazzling summer blue by late afternoon.
City park rangers and volunteers from REI were there to supervise the event, answer questions and give tips on the basics of camping: How to safely build a fire, what to look for in a campsite before pitching a tent, and practical suggestions for what clothes to pack and how to keep kids happy.
The advice from Jennifer McKasson, an REI employee who gave a short presentation on camp stove cooking and cuisine: “When you feed people good food, they’ll have a good time. That goes for kids, too.”
Parks department employee Nichole Chamberlin had taken reservations from eager families for the event. “We were turning people away,” she said. “We closed (the event) on Monday.”
Heather Nick from Mukilteo held her youngest child in her arms, 5-month-old Ava, listening to the camping overview.
“There just aren’t a lot of events like this,” she said. “I just thought it was a cool thing for the kids to do.”
Her older children love to camp, searching for hotdog sticks, sitting by the campfire and telling stories, she said. The family plans to go camping in eastern Washington later this summer.
“We have a lot of good family times,” she said.
Her mother, Pam Naples, from Marysville, said she thinks there should be more events like the backyard campout. “This was, ‘Wow!’ How many kids got excited to come have this adventure,” she said.
Nijay Gupta, his wife, Amy, and children Simryn, 4, Aidan, 2, and infant Elizabeth, drove up from Seattle to participate in the event after learning about it while picking out a tent at REI.
“This is the first time we have been camping as a family,” Nijay Gupta said.
“It was the right price, $15 for the whole family, there’s breakfast, and they do all the stuff,” he said. “It was just a good reason to get started camping.”
Sharon Salyer: 425-339-3486; salyer@heraldnet.com.
More online
The Herald recently published a story “How to survive camping with a toddler.” Go to http://tinyurl.com/ CampingWithToddler.
