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Old 04-13-2005 | 05:41 PM
  #7  
oldrgr
Fork Horn
 
Joined: Feb 2003
Posts: 102
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From: Waialua HI USA
Default RE: whats in your camp?

I hunt with a crew, the senior members of whom have been doing it in the same area, LaGarita Mtns of SW CO, since 1978.
Over time, the camp has evolved into a pretty sophisticated operation.
We have a shower made of muffler pipe construction (threaded) that screws together and is wrapped with a plastic tarp using Velcro. Throw down a wood floor and string two Australian bucket rigs along the cross member and it's great.

We also have two 150 gal. tanks that we keep filled with water for showers. We simply transfer the water to metal buckets for heating. We use a small electric pump to fill the big tanks from a stream down the road (one tank will fit in the back of a pickup).

The central focus of in camp activity occurs in a surplus Army GP Medium tent. Two to three people sleep in it with the remainder sleeping in another 3/4 size (cut down) GP Med. or personal tents (3-4 people size with cots, stove, etc).

One of the more "Rube Goldberg" contraptions is a sink located in the main tent with hot and cold running water. Picture a standard style sink with separate hot and cold spigots. Water is gravity fed via hoses from two overhead buckets that fit into a combo wood / muffler pipe (screws together like the shower frame) structure. The hot water bucket is wrapped with insulation to keep the water hot. Each bucket has a lid to reduce spillage. The sink drains via another hose into a big plastic cement bucket that is drained daily.
One of the nightly chores is to empty the sink before turning in, blowing out the lines to insure water does not remain and thereby freeze. If you have camp cook duties on the day, one task is to heat water and replenish the hot water bucket.
This whole contraption breaks down and fits into a couple of boxes for off-season storage.

Also have the standard burner rig hooked up to propane tanks for cooking.

The tent floors are covered with heavy plastic sheeting.

Tents are heated with pot-bellied wood burning stoves. A couple years ago, tried switching to something akin to what is used in Coleman lamps, but whatever we were using clogged the chimney pipes twice as fast as the wood did. That’s another every other day chore for the camp cooks to “bore brush” the chimney pipes in the main tent.

We use a enclosed trailer with lock to store fresh food.

Shelving is put up serving as a pantry.

A recent addition is the "water torture" mouse trap. It's a large plasitic cement bucket with a dowl rod affixed across the open top. Bucket is about 2/3s full of water. A rotating coke can is affixed longitudinally along the dowl rod and smeared with peanut butter. A flat paint stir serves as a climbing ramp. We get 3-4 every night! Chipmonks had figured out how to "disarm" the old fashioned mouse traps.

The crapper is a fold up wood frame two holer that straddles a trench dug by the rookie hunters each year. We have a battery operated lamp that fits into the super structure (so it doesn’t get knocked in the hole like a couple roles of paper do every year…). At the end of camp we fill in the hole. In the process we stuff the old battery, about the size of your fist, down to the bottom of the hole. We tell the rookies to dig until they get to the battery, thus creating a uniform standard (paper isn’t tickling your backside by the end of the camp!)
Entire camp comes up and goes down and is packed in around three hours.

The original guys began in 1978 sleeping on the ground in a cold camp in Nov. each year.
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