Into the great outdoors
Human beings have been “camping” since the beginning of the species. First, we lived outside or in caves. Then we built crude huts or lived in tents. As we developed agriculture, we built better structures to house ourselves and as shelter for our animals, but even then, we were still mostly outside “in nature.” It was only with industrialization and the growth of cities that people began to live much of the time inside and apart from nature.

Modern “camping” developed when these urbanized people began to need to get back to nature. Writers have various theories about when and how this began to happen, but here in the U.S., camping as we know it began in the second half of the 19th century.

An article in the Smithsonian placed the beginning of this trend in 1868. The Civil War was over. The nation was beginning to heal. There was a post-war economic boom. A Congregational minister in Boston, William Henry Harrison Murray, who loved the outdoors, wrote a small book called “Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks,” which was published in 1869. The book was an instant success and visitors to the Adirondacks increased from 200 or 300 to “an unprecedented horde of 2,000 to 3,000 recreational campers, hunters, and anglers arriving from New York, Boston, Hartford, Philadelphia, and other cities.”

Murray presented camping as kind of a pilgrimage where the person leaves home, journeys to a special place, and returns home changed — a pilgrimage for people “who, put up in narrow offices and narrower studies, weary of the city’s din, long for a breath of mountain air and the free life by field and flood.”

By 1874 the YWCA had established a camp in Pennsylvania, and in 1885 the YMCA founded a camp in New York state that exists to the present day. The Boy Scouts, which began in 1910, and the Girl Scouts (1912) gave impetus to the camping movement. In 1934 the National Park Service developed 34 “Recreation Demonstration Areas,” which was a government name for campgrounds.

Still, camping remained mostly a pastime of the few and the well-to-do, until the prosperity that followed the Second World War, when middle class people living in towns and cities had the leisure and money to go out into the growing park service system and other wilderness areas.

Since 2006 every year has seen more than 40 million people going camping, with an estimated 587.2 million camping days per year or an average of 14½ days per camper. Today, there are more than 113,000 federally managed campsites, more than 166,000 campsites in state parks, and countless private sites.

When camping began, people were trying to get away from the crowding, the noise, and the dirt of the city. Those are still strong reasons for going out into nature, but even at the beginning and throughout the years since, there has been an emphasis on how the great outdoors can have positive physical, psychological, and spiritual benefits.

Murray, being a minister, argued that camping was essential for one’s spiritual vitality. “If a person would know how sensitive his nature is,” Murray declared, “he must leave the haunts of men, where every sight and sound distracts his attention … and amid the silence of the woods, hold communion with his Maker.”

According to an article on the website of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, “There is growing evidence to suggest that exposure to natural environments can be associated with mental health benefits. Proximity to greenspace has been associated with lower levels of stress and reduced symptomology for depression and anxiety.”

Added to this are such obvious physical benefits as exercise, lowered blood pressure, and increased vitamin D. Your activity can boost bone density and strengthen your core muscles, leading to improved balance.

What began and still often begins as an effort to escape indoor confinement and experience an outdoor reality has become a boon to health and a great value in and of itself.