50 Nights a Year

Growing connections

a post from Ben…

In high-school and college, I discovered mountaineering, rock climbing, road trips, and dirt-bag travelling. I loved having my home in a backpack no matter where I was. I wasn’t keeping track of how much time I spent camping, but as I got into my 20s, I spent most of my summers scheming to get outside.

The most important outdoor trip of my life was in 2000 when I met my wife, Rachel. We were camped at White River Campground in Mt. Rainier National Park, waiting for a weather window to climb the mountain. We got to know each other at White River and then Camp Schurman, high on the flanks of Rainier. Our relationship began by sharing a love for being outdoors and we’ve kept it going ever since.

In our thirties, Rachel and I decided to start a family. We talked a lot about what we wanted for our children, the things we’d be giving up, and what we were going to cling to, hell or high-water!  Camping and the outdoors was definitely a legacy we wanted to pass down to our own kids. We wanted them to love it and develop a relationship with the outdoors that would always connect them to us as well as to each other, long after we were gone. 

Making the most of our time

So, enough history… now it has been 10 years since Sahale was born and Leo is almost 7. We’ve done pretty good with getting outside. Rachel and I are  both teachers and getting out for 20+ nights a year has been pretty easy. In the last few years, I think we’ve been getting pretty close to 30 just getting out whenever we can. It has been fantastic and while getting out whenever you can is great, at some point we realized that we could be getting out even more if we were just a little more intentional about it.  The camping-on-a-whim plan was not doing our love -legacy justice. We wanted to bump up our game. 

The difference between a goal and dream is a plan

I didn’t think about counting the nights until about three years ago when I read an article by Brendan Leonard who was shooting for 30+ nights a year, outside, between memorial day and labor day. We were already getting pretty close to 30 nights (that year we counted 29 total). After looking at the year and tallying up the potential camping nights within the Northwest’s the-weather-might-be-good-enough-to-camp season we decided to add another 20 nights to the bargain! Every weekend that we could reasonably use to get out… we would get out! 

And so it is that, with the desire to up our intentionality and make sure we are getting out as much as we can, the goal has become 50 nights a year in a tent, van, under-the-stars, and maybe even a rustic cabin or two. It’ll be a challenge navigating weather, professional obligations, family events, etc., but the challenge will give us that extra nudge. Even if we just get a couple more nights out a year for all of us, it’ll be a couple more notches into the family tradition and legacy I inherited from my dad and that Rachel and I want to leave behind with our kids and grand kids. 

50 nights outside in 2018 – here we come!