Text by Patrick Bell.
Our feature today is a gallery of vehicles in camping mode. There is a good assortment of images to view, so grab your sleeping bag and we shall begin.
Our first stop is in Nova Scotia, where a search reported this ’73 Ford Country Sedan from New York was on a camping trip in 1977. It looked like a trim set up, with the efforts of a tent perhaps outweighed by the convenience of not having a trailer to deal with.
Junior was playing in the water at a campsite with a ’50 Plymouth De Luxe All Metal Suburban in the background. It was equipped with a roof carrier of some sort that was being used to dry a blanket.
A heavily wooded and busy campground was where this ’56 Oldsmobile 88 4 door sedan was parked. It was towing a small camp trailer that I am sure was no problem for the “Rocket T-350” engine.
This wonderful image is called “Camping at Tenaya Lake” in Yosemite National Park, and was taken in 1956. They had quite an elaborate set up with a good sized tent, lots of equipment, and a close to new ’56 Pontiac 870 4 door Station Wagon.
Here we may have the dry out phase following a storm that soaked everything. There was a line full of towels, as well as the tarps on the V8 powered ’56 Ford Country Sedan. In front of it was a ’55 or ’56 Buick Special or Century Estate Wagon.
Now we are at what may have been a work site, possibly in the State of Idaho as Custer County, Idaho is where this ’57 Ford Fairlane 500 Town Sedan was from. It has a heavy duty trailer hitch but I don’t see a trailer.
Ferrino is an Italian tent company (along with other outdoor equipment), and here is one at a campsite along with a ’62-’67 Volkswagen Type 2 Deluxe 23 Window Bus from California. It appears that the back of the bus is the kitchen counter, and the young teenager was taking inventory.
In this image we have a rather interesting pair of vehicles to go camping in. A ’67 Pontiac GTO Hardtop Coupe with the standard hub caps from New York, and a ’58 Cadillac Fleetwood Seventy-Five. The Fleetwood for hauling stuff, and the GTO for fast trips to town.
We have visited this ’68 Chevrolet Bel Air wagon with a pop up tent on top somewhat recently. We viewed it from another angle, and this side shows the apparatus better. It does look like it would work just fine.
Per a search this shot was taken in April of 1973 on the Ontario side of Lake Superior and titled “Heading up to Lake Superior for some fishing”. Three students at a North Carolina college decided to take a spur of the moment spring break trip to Canada in a ’58-’63 Volkswagen Type 1 with a missing front bumper.
Search results report this 1971 photo was in Salmon-Challis National Forest in Idaho. The truck is a ’70 or ’71 Ford F-250 Ranger XLT with a cabover camper. It looked like a beautiful summer day.
A warm summer day at a lake perhaps in British Columbia as that is where this ’76 or ’77 Dodge Tradesman van was from. It was equipped with a raised roof and they had a pop up trailer as well. Fun in the sun!
Thanks for joining us and to all good day!
Stopped working for a moment when I saw this E-mail. Great photos and excellent work as a sleuth in identifying so many of the loci. The campsites with few other campers relates to a peaceful vacation for the campers. Thanks for the photos and the explanations – including drying out after a rain!
Photo #5: V8 powered ’56 Ford Country Sedan
Used to go camping in eastern Pennsylvania. It rained from the moment I left my apartment to the time I returned home Sunday afternoon. EVERYTHING was sopping wet. Just rolled the tent, sleeping bag, mattress, blankets, etc into one big ball and stuffed them into the back of my SUV. No sooner has I pulled into the apartment complex, the sun came out!! Draped everything over the railing by the apartment door. Took two full days for it to dry out.
The fun of camping!
SWEET ~
I remember camping all over the East Coast in the late 50’s through early 70’s , always in those green tents .
My sainted late stepfather bought a new Plymouth “Suburban” in 1949 to haul ’round the sails for his racing catamaran sail boat . he loved it long after it was gone .
I _LOVE_ the #241 DeLuxe VW Typ II ! .
-Nate
The blanket on the Plymouth accidentally shows what a Suburban ute would have looked like. Too bad Plymouth didn’t grab the opportunity. They had rebranded some Dodge pickups before the war, so customers were already familiar with the idea of Plymouth trucks.
Camping is one of those things that seems like it could be fun (at least with the right people, in the right place, if the weather is nice), but I’ve never done, except maybe when I was a kid and have lost recollection of.
The VW T1 looks much older than a mid-’60s model to me. I’m not sure of the changeover year, but the hatch doors were made much wider than the engine compartment door below it by then.
I had some trouble narrowing that one down. Nate could probably fill us in properly. I went with ’62-’67 because of the tail lights. From what I could see the 23 window style retained the narrow hatch in order to have room for the corner windows.
Thanks for your comment.
The wider rear door arrived for MY 1964, making this a ’62 or ’63.
As @Thomas Merjanian notes, the scarcity of other people in some of these scenes reminds me of what it was like back then. Not so much nowadays.
As Nate says, “always in those green tents”. Yup, that was camping when I was a kid. Our green tent had that same odor as everyone’s green tent (if you had one, you know what I mean), and it weighed the same as everyone else’s incredibly heavy canvas family tent. So these pictures bring back a lot of memories.
The two guys in the Beetle are my kind of guys. I was about 6 or 7 years behind them, but doing things like driving from NC to Ontario on a whim to go fishing was exactly the sort of thing that I also did in college. Regularly. Only I dare say that I got wherever I was going a lot faster in a V8 Buick than they did in that VW. I wonder how long that trip to Canada took them…
Eventually, the bumper fell off of my Buick as well.
We were the odd family with a blue canvas tent, just as heavy and smelled the same. It came from the Sears sporting goods department, Sir Edmond Hillary brand. Coleman-built gasoline stove and lantern also were not green, but Sears blue. Dad liked blue anyway, as we had blue cars.
I like those Beetle guys too, but I was about a decade later. I had a ’63 Type 1 in a very similar shade of green. Really, it could go anywhere, so the perfect choice for a fishing adventure.
4th photo, sharply focused B/W, ’56 Pontiac wagon at Tenaya Lake —
Reminiscent of Ansel Adams’ photos 😎
That photo was taken by a Yosemite National Park Ranger named Robert N. McIntyre. McIntyre later went on to be Yellowstone National Park’s chief naturalist in the 1960s. This particular image ended up in NPS’s archives – I can’t find any other pictures taken by McIntyre, which is too bad, because judging by this one shot, he had immense talent.
Incidentally, McIntyre is in the photo below, third from the left.
The last picture looks like it was possibly (probably?) taken at Herald’s Park on Shuswap Lake, while looking south across the salmon arm of this large, H-shaped lake. The viewer is looking towards the TransCanada highway, the path of which can be discerned as a cut line in the trees on the background mountain side.
Our summer place is about 8 miles north of this spot. I could be wrong however, as this view is probably not completely unique to this location.
I had Shuswap Lake in mind as a possibilty as well, the Highway was the barely visible cutline higher up and the CPR was the lower one. Or the other way around…. As you say, this could be a lot of places in our province.
I can smell the campfire and feel the mosquitos!
Thank you for these wonderful photos. I’m about to go into the camping season at the lil riverside campground I work weekends at in my part of SWVA. The pics are a nice change from the Class As and tri axle 5th wheels I’ll see all summer. Ocassionally I’ll see a cool vintage set up, a VW van, a nice converted van or a school bus like I’m building out.
Thanks again!
These pics are way before my time but there were a good 2 years where the entirety of my family went camping in the Wisconsin woods when I was probably 7-8 years old and with my Dad being the Illinois yuppie in his Audi 100 I bet we probably looked as out of place as that 67 GTO did… And FWIW I slept in that car instead of the tent after a few horrendous thunderstorms rolled through!
’65 Impala wagon, with covered roof rack, took us on many weekend camping adventures in Southern California, mountains and desert. Joshua Tree National Monument, not yet a National Park, was a favorite destination.
Dad resisted at first, preferring motel beds, but mom wanted to relive childhood camping with her uncle. When I was old enough to help with the chores, we went and dad was hooked.
I wish I had photographed more as a child.Then I might have a picture of our BMW 2000 in front of a lean to in Ward Pound Ridge Reservation in Pound Ridge NY.
Yes, I commented in a recent post where the 10th photo down with the car top camper was also shown; my Dad owned that exact camper in the late 60’s, it is a Camp O’Tel and quite ingenious, you could tell that a mechanical wiz designed it, not just the camper itself but the accessories are pretty well thought out (it came with a slide-off dinette with 2 flip down sides for table space and in the middle had a Coleman fuel stove and 2 wash tubs for cleaning up). It also had a cabana with primitive (cold water) shower and a bag type toilet. The picture shows one of the long cylindrical water tanks with integral “pole” handles I remember it was about 10 gallons and heavy even with the 2 people it was designed to have carry it. The unit was designed to crank down onto the rain gutter of your car when mounted on the ceiling of our garage when being stored. It could be picked up and carried by 4 people but it was pretty heavy and the canvas risked getting scraped if you came too close to something sharp (you can tell how I know)…the canvas was external to the camper box when folded for storage while driving.
The real funny thing is the 1st picture shows a ’73 Ranch Wagon, in the color my Dad bought new in early ’73…about the time he parted with the Camp O’Tel. He purchased a 20′ Viking pop-top camper to replace the Camp O’Tel and a month later bought the Ranch Wagon. I remember him being chided by the owner of the camping dealer for buying the Ranch wagon 2nd, since he had just had a hitch put on our prior ’69 Country Squire and had to do the same on the Ranch Wagon.
The Viking camper felt like we were living in luxury compared to the Camp O’Tel which would get crowded when we had to endure rainstorm with 6 people (2 adults and 4 kids). The Viking actually had a fold down wardrobe closet and a dresser (in place of a couch) so we didn’t need suitcases, we each had a (pretty small) drawer to fit our clothes in. It also had a spring-loaded awning which didn’t need any support ropes, it used tension against the top of the camper to hold the poles in place.