New Campground Design

This area at Yosemite National Park?EUR??,,????'???s Upper Pines shows traditional campground features like tight spacing of sites and lack of visual separation between sites.

Under the watchful gaze of conifers whose tops have been dancing in the afternoon winds for centuries, change is afoot, triggered by a demographic shift. The classic national park campsite was designed for the nuclear family — mom, dad and 2.5 kids, back when the closest thing to a satellite dish was the Big Dipper, picnic tables seated six and there was parking for one vehicle.

The trend today across all parklands is a much bigger tent, thanks to multigenerational campers and ethnic diversity.

“We’ve had a resurgence of something that disappeared in the early 20th century, and that’s the extended family, which might be a Korean caravan from Southern California with four matching vans or a big Hispanic family from Fresno,” says Bill Tweed, chief naturalist at Sequoia Kings Canyon National Park.

The trend is seconded by Kerry Gates, supervising landscape architect for California state parks. “We’re absolutely having bigger groups,” he echoes. “There’s now a much greater cultural group of users, extended families, who want to share their experience together.”

Gates is experimenting with a larger picnic table, larger food preparation areas, and he’s thinking about retrofitting some camping areas with yurts to accommodate more people. He notes “the social experience overrides the outdoor experience” these days in many state parks.

Most of the campgrounds in Sequoia Kings Canyon were built by the Civilian Conservation Corps in the 1930s and ‘40s. Park officials have continued to tinker with the template laid down by the agency — loop track, picnic table, fire pit, spigots and restrooms — as they grapple with the unpredictable realm of human behavior and gauge camper impact.

They’ve gone through generations of fire rings and bear boxes to keep up with fickle visitors. But they also closed a 300-site campground and lodge in Giant Forest in 1970 when they concluded a sequoia grove and car camping weren’t sustainable.

At Moraine, Aldrich and Phillips, clutching a squawking walkie-talkie, are waiting for 600 tons of base rock to creep up the canyon for the new asphalt loop and revamped parking spots. The duo stands amid heavy equipment and a ghost campground, with pavement dug up and ragged picnic benches tipped up on one end for removal.

The paint-stripped wreck of a table at campsite 75 is an archeological homage to days of excess greasy bacon, overweight coolers and whittlers with too much time on their hands. A camper pictograph that reads “Vieter ‘74” saves the expense of carbon dating. Tall stalks of grass shoot up around the site, making it feel like an abandoned homestead along the Missouri Breaks.

This forlorn scene makes it clear how much the camping magic depends on how the table is set. Though the perception is that nature did all the work, a classic campsite requires the touch of parkitecture.

“The landscaping that the crews do within the site will give the impression of wilderness or development,” says Dan Blackburn, maintenance chief at Sequoia Kings Canyon. “They’ll use boulders to create a natural effect around the tent pads that give it that rustic or architecture feel.”

It’s a similar approach in state parks. Gates says his goal is to “perpetuate and not compromise the spirit of place.” He uses the local vegetation to provide privacy buffers between camps. If it’s not available, he plants trees and shrubs, using a native plant palette to keep the site as natural as possible.

When the stage is set, campers can suspend adulthood and slip away from it all. At Cedar Grove’s Sheep Creek camp, Costa Mesa residents Mike Marshall and his wife, Sharon, reveled in the decades they’d put between themselves and the Orange crush. Marshall said he’d been coming to Cedar Grove for 35 years because “nobody can find me. I’m just like these lizards crawling on rocks here. I’m just another lizard.”

The lizard impulse is driven by the prize at the heart of the camping experience: freedom, from the yoke of duty, complexity, chaos, hurry-worry.

When Barry Garst explored the meanings people attach to camping for his doctoral thesis at Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources this year, he found freedom at the top of the list — “escape from urban areas, escape from the technologies and stressors of life, everything from work pressures to home pressures,” followed by interaction with families and fellow campers.

Crafting the natural ambience of a campsite is the easy part, but letting freedom ring when the sound is a whining generator or boom box croaking 50 Cent is the more artful piece of social engineering.

Before the first formal campgrounds were invented by the National Park Service and the U.S. Forest Service in the 1920s, there weren’t any limits on park behavior. Folks who chugged by wagon 3 miles per hour up the road to the Sierra in the 1890s could plop a tent anywhere they liked.

Along with structured campgrounds came regulations, though park management tries to make them feel more like etiquette. If a park feels restrictive, campers could lose a key value of the experience. Before they get to the rule book, park staff tries to head off conflict between neighbors with physical engineering, making sure there’s enough space between campsites, or the perception of it through vegetation buffers. —L.A. Times