Last year I got the bug to give camping a try. So I spent way too much time pouring over camping gear on the REI website, bought a bunch of stuff that looked like what I needed, and headed off to Dunewood Campground in the Indiana Dunes National Park.
I choose this camp ground mostly because I was familiar with the area, and it is close enough that if the whole camping thing imploded on me I was only an hour from home. So very low risk. Since the camp site is within the Indiana Dunes I could indulge in hitting my favorite trails during the day. Over last summer and this summer I have now gone to this camp ground 5 times, just having finished up my fifth visit.
Each trip has been a learning experience, and on each subsequent trip I improved on something that had not gone well previously. For this visit I actually had what some might consider to be a somewhat odd objective, I wanted to go camping in cool rainy weather. My previous four trips had all been mild or hot weather with no precipitation. I had always brought a tarp along incase of rain, but had yet to use it. Well I got to use it on this visit. Two nights and one full day of nearly continuous rain, varying from light to moderately heavy. As a bonus the last night of the trip was supposed to be clear, but a pop up thunderstorm came through the area at 4:30am.
Setting Up Camp
One of the things which has contributed a lot to being able to enjoy camping has been the tent which I choose. It is a great size for two people with out crowding for those times my wife comes along, and quite spacious for one when I am solo. It sets up real easy and is very well thought out. On this visit it took me 20 minutes to have the entire thing setup, including the rain fly, and fully staked out.
Here we are just arrived at the empty site. Although this my 5th trip to this campground, this particular site (Mather #13) was also the site for my very first camping trip with my wife. On this one I was solo. For some strange reason she is not all that thrilled by the idea of camping in cool and rainy weather.
Pop open the trunk and the first thing out is the footprint. Basically a ground tarp which is matches the size of the tent (i.e. its foot print) and sits underneath to provide extra protection against punctures by rocks and condensation from water that gets under the tent.
About 5 minutes later the tent is unpacked and laid out on top of the footprint. I decided to orient the entry way away from the direction the rain was supposed to be coming from, which meant to the right in this view.
Four shock-corded poles crisscross the top and sides of the tent to hold it up and provide structural stability. The design is well thought out and it is not at all difficult for one person to insert and raise each crossing pair of poles.
About 15 minutes later we have the tent fully setup and staked out and the rainfly in place and also staked out. It is totally ready to go. At this point I just tossed my sleeping gear in the tent and then hopped into the car to go spend the rest of the afternoon hiking and engaging in nature photography. All told, from the time I pulled up to the site to the time I headed out to the trail was about an hour, which included about 15 minutes talking with the campground host who remembered me and my wife from earlier in the year when I strained my back doing something stupid on the second day of that trip. She was telling some stories about the previous weekend which was the big Labor day holiday and the camp ground was full with lots of activity.
Setting Up Inside
The tent is called the Base Camp 4, and for one person it really does have enough space to act as a very comfortable basecamp for multiple days of hiking trails in the surrounding National Park. I used a cot + air mattress for sleeping, and with a very nice little portable charging station I could keep my phone, tablet, laptop and cameras all charged up. I ended the trip with the charging station at 58%, so I could easily have made it 6 days before having to recharge the recharger. I was able to review and edit the days photos, email and play games in the late afternoon and through the evenings. Because of the mosquitos ( the campsite is adjacent to a marsh ) I usually retire to inside the tent within an hour or two of sunset, though with all the rain and the cooler temps they were much less of a problem than back in July.
You can see how easily a second cot and air mattress would fit into this tent. It really is very roomy. I found that having a thick blanket really helps make the floor much more comfortable. Notice the small downward pointing black triangle in the middle of the far wall of the tent. That is a very handy mesh pouch for storing things. There are about 10 of them placed all around the inside of the tent. I use this one to store my glasses, car keys, head lamp and $ when I sleep. This way I always know where they are when I wake up in the middle of the night and need to go pee.
And this is the other end of the tent. I bought this beach chair specifically because its low profile is perfect for sitting inside the tent. Since it was raining and cool, I have all of the mesh windows zipped up closed. But trust me, the tent is very well ventilated, even with the rainfly on.
Setting Up For Rain
The weather for the first day of the trip called for clear skies all day with rain developing that night. So after returning from my day hike I set out figuring out how to string up a 12′ x 12′ tarp so as to create an extended porch where I could hang out while it rained and would not blow away in the wind. Turns out this it one of those things for which you can check out lots of How To videos and not get any useful information. What you can and cannot do with a tarp depends a lot on whether or not there are any nearby trees or other objects to which you can wrap a rope. This campground is in a wooded location so trees were plentiful and I eventially ended up with this arrangement for my experiment in rain camping.
I was completely dry under the tarp, which was quite sturdy and did not flap or flop around. To be fair it was not a windy stormy rain, just a steady continuous rain that came pretty much straight down. If it had been a driving rain being whipped all directions in the wind I would have had to spend the whole time inside the tent with the rainfly closed up. I discovered that a benefit of camping in a sandy area is that the ground drains real well, no matter how hard it rained there was almost no pooling of water.
Rain, Rain And More Rain
Beginning at about 10pm the evening of the first day, it started raining and did not stop until about 7am the morning of the third day.
Breakfast in the rain. Love my little butane camping stove. Scrambled eggs with cheddar cheese. I caught a few drops of rain going back and forth to the trunk of the car to get food and cooking stuff. A lesson we learned in May of this year is to put ALL food and food related items in the car at night. Turns out that campgrounds make perfect foraging sites for raccoons. Being awakened by the snarling of two raccoons fighting 2 feet from your head over a scrap of food in the middle of the night is rather startling the first time you make this mistake.
A little late afternoon stroll through the rest of the loop showed that only about half the sites were occupied. You would think that some people don’t want to go camping in the rain. Meh, go figure.
This is what my site looks like from the site across the road. One thing I like about Dunewood Campground is how well spaced out the sites are. You are not sitting in an RV parking lot here, you have pretty good privacy, even when the campground is full up.
Dinner is on the stove. After a day of hiking in a marsh in a cool rain, some cheddar broccoli soup and fresh bread is a nice way to end the day. That blue tote the camp stove is sitting on holds all of my cooking and eating gear. Normally I put the stove up on the picnic bench, but it was in the rain so this was the next best option. I think I took this pic about 15 seconds before the soup boiled over and made a nice mess all over the stove, which fortunately is designed to be easily cleaned.
And the view at night. Before heading inside for the rest of the evening I did a grounds check to make sure I had not left anything out for the raccoons, and to make sure the tent and tarp stakes and guy lines were all in place.
Since photos do not really convey the full sense of sitting under a tarp in the rain all day, here is a short sound clip during a typical part of the early evening.
The End
When taking down a tent which has been sitting in a wet, marshy campground for three days, you come across an array of interesting critters who have decided to make your place their home. In addition to evicting plenty of mosquitos, crane flys, etc… I came across these two interesting guys.
Found this Spiny Orb-Weaver spider on the tent underneath the rainfly. After taking his pic a light bop on the other side of the tent fabric sent him flying harmlessly. I don’t think he would have enjoyed the ride back to Chicago, all rolled up in the tent and stuffed into a sack.
This Walking Stick bug was hanging out on one of the legs of my folding camp table. After I dislodged him and went to get my camera, he had wandered over to this leaf with a droplet of water in his mouth.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. Even a three day camping trip in the rain. Here we are at 11am on the day of checkout, hardly any sign that I was there, though if you look carefully you can see the outline of where the tent was just a short time earlier. Soon some other camper(s) will be unloading and setting up in this same spot for their own camping vacation.
