When I lived in Mission, I used to go camping constantly. As a 15/16/17 year old teen, I'd plan a camp and invite a bunch of my scouts along with. Most of them were younger than me, though I'd often get Gordon to come along, and he was two years older.
One of my favourite areas to hike in was this area around Davis Lake Provincial Park.
When I did camping as a part of wilderness hiking I traveled light. No tent, just a fly sheet, ground sheet, and some rope to hold it up. I'd point the open end of this shelter toward the fire, and we'd generally have a couple of dead hemlock saplings that we'd broken or cut down that we'd put across the fire. It would burn through at the middle, and we'd reach out of the sleeping bag to push the two ends in as they burned away. We'd talk, plan our next adventures and tell jokes by the fire light, occasionally pushing some ends in to keep it burning. Eventually we'd fall asleep, to awake in the morning when it began to get light.
Just past the end of Davis lake, possibly still in the park area was a creek that ran past the road called Weatherhead creek on the old topographic maps. There was a rough logging road that ran down up along the ravine that the creek cut through the mountains (it was a sizable creek), and I recall trying to hike up it with some of my scouts (to see where it led and what interesting discoveries we'd make up there, of course...)
We did this one time, and one of my scouts, Raymond, brought a little transistor radio with him. We had crawled into our shelters, with the embers of the fire still glowing. He turned on CKLG and we listened. I remember that no one spoke as we went through several songs. I clearly recall two songs that we heard that night. They were Dreams by Fleetwook Mac and Miracles by Jefferson Starship.
Music has always meant a lot to me. There was something about those two songs that really felt like magic that night. To this day, hearing either of those songs takes me back to Weatherhead creek, under a flysheet, with my young scouts, me still in my teens and with a fire glowing just outside my shelter.
