I am just back from CampingCon 2024, held at Camp Thunderbird in Mimbres, New Mexico. A Campingcon is a conference focused on the topic of public history in outdoor spaces, where the participants camp.
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| A road in the Mimbres Mountain of southern New Mexico. |
The first CampingCon, organized by Tammy Gordon and Anne Wishnaut, was held in 2016 in Great Smoky Mountains National Park. We all tented in a group campground and the sessions took the form of hike-and-talks, campfire presentations, and sessions that leveraged physical features like a preserved log cabin to talk about log cabin iconography in outdoor spaces. It was a delightful and unique conference, and around the campfire on the last night various attendees promised to host a CampingCon in their region.
My friend Brandon Andrews and I organized the second CampingCon in 2019 at San Juan Island National Historical Park. We followed the inspired format of the first, with the welcome additions of National Park Service cabin tents and a visiting pod of Orca whales that disrupted one seaside session.
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| Chad Pritchard of EWU presents the geology of the San Juan Islands from atop Young Hill at CampingCon 2019. |
CampingCon 2024: Wilderness and the Historian was organized by New Mexico State University Archivist Dylan McDonald and took place at Camp Thunderbird, a church youth camp in southern New Mexico. The conference program is here.
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| My conference is cooler than your conference. |
The conference came off beautifully. There was a combination of traditional presentations in the camp lodge and field trips to nearby sites such as the Mimbres Culture Heritage Site and Fort Bayard Museum and Fort Bayard National Historic Landmark. The 40-some-odd attendees would gather around the campfire each night for music and conversation. A bottle of whiskey might have made an appearance. Highlights of the conference for me were the sessions about outdoor education and especially Jeff Shepherd's evening presentation about the ways that histories of wilderness preservation are too often told separately from the historical context.
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| Mike Wurz of the University of the Pacific presents the ongoing controversy around the racial views of conservation giant John Muir |
The most striking thing to me that separates a CampingCon from a more staid academic conference is the relationships. In four days of discussions, hikes, and field experiences I made more real connections than I ever have at a traditional conference.
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| Me with Brian Forist and Joan Zenzen, we three have attended all three CampingCons |
"Conferences are bad," a friend once said to me. "They give you ideas. Ambitions. These things lead to unhappiness. Don't go to conferences!" He was only half in jest, and I get it. But conferences also recharge our batteries and remind us why we do what we do. And I left with a couple of new research ideas--and one for teaching.
My university is in the process of enhancing something we are already pretty good at, involving students in experiential learning. Inspired by presentations at the CampingCon, I am going to try and cook up some kind of "outdoor semester" at EWU. We use the outdoors in our region as a classroom to learn academic disciplines such as history, the natural sciences, and writing. We take students first to local sites, including Turnbull National Wildlife Refuge, Lake Roosevelt National Recreation Area, and state parks. Work with the outdoor center so students learn canoeing, hiking, perhaps fishing, and wilderness survival along the way. For the final part of the quarter we get on a bus and go for a week or two camping and exploring in the national parks--either east to Glacier and Yellowstone or west to Rainier and the Olympics.
Anyway, a big thank you to all the folks who made CampingCon 2024 so great. I will see you at the next one.
