Newbie 13 night car camping (lengthy w/pix)

[pbbelly]

Background:
My wife and I love to camp. In years past we owned a motorhome, but fuel bills made lengthy adventures unfeasible. In 2007 I built a small teardrop-esque camper

http://www.tnttt.com/viewtopic.php?f...=canoe#p227334 that we have drug all over the southwest and back and all over our home state of Missouri. We managed to average 19 mpg pulling it with a KIA Sportage. Well that Sportage is long gone and the one that replaced it is long enough in the tooth that I didn't feel comfortable setting out on such a long journey with it.
We plan to retire fairly early and to accomplish that we are going to have to live modestly in retirement. We hope to travel the country in a fashion that won't break the bank. We decided to give hammock camping a try.
Typically we make an annual trip to Puerto Penasco, Sonora, Mexico for a concert. In the past we have always flown into Phoenix and rented a car for the four hour drive to Penasco. This year we wanted to spend a little more time down there and wanted to see some more of the desert southwest so we decided to drive and hammock camp. Here are some of the hammock-related highlights. I won't dwell much on the sightseeing that we did or this will be crazy long.

Our equipment:
We didn't anticipate having much in the way of trees to hang our hammocks from once we got past Oklahoma so we figured we would need some sort of free standing stand. Well I purchased several hammocks from dejoha thinking I could experiment with different models to find something that suited me (same goes for my wife). He had a Mayan woven hammock listed at the same time but it was spoken for before I got to it. I was intrigued by that so I hunted another one down and purchased it and a metal, collapsible stand from a web site called swings-n-things. That hammock is awesome. Not something I would necessarily want to camp in, but I love to lounge in it while watching tv or...wait, I digress. Anyway, I tried out all of my hammocks in the metal stand and it worked very well with all of them-so well that I bought another stand for us to use on our trip. They are heavy and a little bulky, but that wasn't really an issue for us since we never camped far from the car.

Mine:
Trek Light Single hammock
Vivere hammock stand
Cabelas tarp
Arrowhead Eq/Kick *** Quilt (Jarbridge river)
Hammock Bliss no-see-um net
El Cheapo Wal Mart synthetic mummy bag (didn't want anything worth too much in anticipation of lots of sand and sweat)

Hers:
Trek Light Double (she preferred the lay of this one over the single-I liked them both equally)
Vivere hammock stand
Grand Trunk AT convertible usd as a tarp
same underquilt, bug net and mummy bag

Here's a picture of our camp on the first night:

We camped at Red Rock Canyon state park near Hinton , OK. While we had spent several nights in the hammocks indoors, I did not have an opportunity in the days leading up to the trip to pitch the tarps or even make use of the bug nets. We arrived after dusk so I got to do all of that for the first time by headlamp. It turned out not to be a big deal. Everything worked great and we had a good night's sleep. We have hiked all of the trails in this park in the recent past, so we just cooked breakfast and left early the next morning, heading west.

Night two, Guadalupe Mountains National Park.


Ah, the wonderful, marvelous lack of humidity. I should mention that my wife and I both suffer from food and environmental allergies. One of the reasons we love camping in the southwest so much is the fact that none of our environmental allergens are around in the desert. We can both breath easily and she can forego her daily antihistamines.
Unfortunately for us, we got to experience the bulk of the Guads' annual rainfall that night. The campground was situated on a hilltop (surrounded by mountains) and there was enough lightning that we didn't feel comfortable hanging in between two lightning rods so we bugged out to our car until is passed. The winds were strong enough to drag the 50 pound rocks that I had attached our tarp guys to and in one instance the dragging rock rubbed through the guy rope. our bedding got pretty soaked. Fortunately it was warm and our bedding dried out a lot by morning. As a side note, the campground was full of sleeping bags hung out to dry the next day, so the tent campers didn't fair any better than we did.

Well, I am going to stop here for now and continue later with another installment.

KS

[nothermark]

Interesting. Waiting for the next installment. My guess is that there are a lot of folks here who will find this useful.

[WVScouter]

Where did you get the stand? What is the length ?

[Basie]

Those are great lookin' stands

[pbbelly]

Where did you get the stand? What is the length ?

http://www.myhammock.com/proddetail....%2DSSCHS&cat=2

They say it is 9'. I don't have mine set up to measure, but that sounds about right.

[pbbelly]

If you'd like to see a route of our travels, visit this link:
https://maps.google.com/maps/ms?msid...72%2C46.450195
There are notes about each major stop along the way-even those where we didn't stay the night.

Night two:

We spent the third day hiking in the Guadalupe Mountains National Park. We barely scratched the surface of everything there is to see. We definitely plan to spend more time there. Here's a panorama that includes the ruins of an old Butterfield Stagecoach stop that is within the park:


We wanted to watch the bat flight at nearby Carlsbad Caverns that night and the only other (state/federal) campground nearby did not look as appealing and our route west was going to take us right past this same campground so we decided to spend another night there (different spot). It was a much better night. The stars were awesome. ( You can see them well through the Hammock Bliss bug net, but it definitely obscures the view. I would open my eyes periodically through the night to see how the view was. If it looked good I would unzip the net and stick my head out for a while.

Going into this I had anticipated only using the bug net in the eastern portion of our journey, but it turned out we used them every night except in Mexico (more about that later). Since we were car camping, rather than totally disassemble each hammock each night, I would stretch the sleeping bag out nicely within the hammock and then wrap the bug net around everything and cinch it down to form a cocoon.



I then stuffed these two cocoons into an army duffle. That really sped up the set up/tear down of camp. The black thing on the ground in the above picture is the canvas bag that the stand comes with. It is made of a very nice canvas and works well for a "door mat" while the hammock is erected.

I should also mention that with these stands and my Trek Light Hammocks there's no need for suspension. I wish I had taken pictures...I typically hooked the head end of the hammock directly on one of the horns of the stand with a larks head and the foot end over the horn to one of the stands adjustable hooks in the highest hole. Initially we had just looped each end directly onto a horn, but after the thunderstorm the hang was too low so we had to readjust. When I tried my Grand trunk nano with this stand I ended up putting the hooks in the lowest holes and using my whoopee slings. That worked nicely too. I don't think there's enough room to use the whoopee slings with the Trek Lights without adding additional hooks and doubling the sling back to them.

Night Four:

We stopped at a state park in New Mexico that was tiny, lacked any facilities to speak of and looked to be full. While heading to the next park down the road we encountered several dust storms. Since we had yet to have an opportunity for showers (The two shower houses we tried at Red Rock Canyon were out of order, and the Guad campground didn't have any) and the thought of hammock camping in a dust storm didn't sound appealing, we stopped at a motel for the night. This turned out to be our only chance for a decent internet connection on the whole trip and the only night that we didn't sleep in our hammocks.

more to come...

[nothermark]

Thanks for 2, looking for 3! ;-) I think you need a privacy setup. I usually traveled with a canoe when camping so I would just drape a big tarp over the canoe and drop it around the truck tailgate area to get a private wash and dress area. That probably won't work for you but I do not think it would be too hard to come up with a simple floor less shelter. In some places that would also satisfy the morality police that require a closed dressing area.

[Atlas918]

Those are some mighty fine set ups you have there on your adventure. Thanks for sharing

[L84toff]

Very cool!

[pbbelly]

Night Five:

We rolled into the Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument (one of my favorite places on earth!) after the visitor's center had closed. We figured (apparently mistakenly) that the main campground near the visitor's center would have a lot of campers in it so we opted to head back north a few miles to the Alamo Canyon primitive campground. This is my favorite campground ever! just four or five spots with bbq grilles, trash/recycling cans and a nice new pit toilet. The temperature was well into the triple digits, but the humidity was in the single digits, so we were in paradise. I knew it would cool off quickly once the sun sat, so I set up the hammocks, head-to-toe in the long shadow of a huge saguaro cactus. I figured that this might keep the bedding slightly cooler thus making for a shorter wait for comfortable sleeping temps.



Now I should mention that this campground is located a very few miles from the US/Mexican border. Also, apparently there is a US airbase close enough that they use this area for training missions. Now I am familiar with fighter jet training missions. I work at a mine located deep in the Mark Twain National Forest. The local Air National Guard likes to use our mine headframes as targets in their wargames-this often gives me a front row seat to my own private air show. http://youtu.be/JVa5FIzwvmw Subsequently I wasn't (too) alarmed when fighter jets flew over and then proceeded to circle our camp at a wide radius for the better part of an hour. My suspicions were confirmed the next day when we stopped by the visitor's center. The rangers said that indeed a nearby (as the jet flies) airbase did indeed fly training missions over the area, utilizing infrared technology to hunt for illegal aliens as they try to cross the desert north of the border. While having this conversation it occurred to me that our head-to-toe sleeping arrangement probably made for some odd thermal imaging for the pilots to observe. No wonder they circled for so long.

Did I mention how amazing the sunset was? Judge for yourselves:







The Eagles' Peaceful Easy Feeling kept running through my head this night...I tried to capture the stars, but my digital camera isn't capable of a long enough exposure to do it justice.

Here's another view of our hammocks here, note the slender shadow from the cactus:



That's all for tonight. More later...