Year: 2016

I hope my upcoming book, Under The Stars: How America Fell In Love With Camping, shines a light on some forgotten heroes of the backcountry, including the eccentric and swashbuckling Kate Field, who fought for your right to camp. She dared to go camping with a group of like-minded adventurous women at a time when many men sneered at the idea of ladies taking part in this ‘un-lady-like activity.” In 1869 she and her girlfriends ventured out into the Adirondacks of upstate New York. She snickered at male critics who predicted she and her pals would die out there in the forest. Instead, they breathed in the invigorating dry air, “redolent of balsam,” stomped through the mud, gazed out over the still waters, and gorged on fish and fresh venison, at a time when “respectable” ladies were being asked not to overexert themselves, less they strain their “delicate” constitutions. “There are those…

This vintage photograph shows the author’s father rocking a bright-red Picasso shirt while taking a brief snoozer near Shadow Lake.  Welcome to the brand-new Under The Stars website. For one thing, this site will be the best and fastest way for me to get the word out about my upcoming book, Under The Stars: How America Fell In Love With Camping, readings and other events. But this will also be my way to celebrate camping itself, to call attention to a few Heroes and Anti-Heroes of American camping, to share stories about wonderful as well as wondrously disgusting camping foods, and to collect and publicize camping stories from all over America and beyond. This website is the direct result of a long obsession. I’ve been camping as long as I can remember, initially in Yosemite, where a rank cabin and bear prints all over our dusty station wagon prompted a…

  I am honored to report that Under The Stars made this Travel & Leisure book list this week. T & L says: “Dan White uses his own love for the outdoor activity—whether on a treelined traffic divider near Skykomish, Washington, on the Pacific Crest Trail, or on a beautiful bluff in Point Reyes, California—to discuss the history of camping (it began, in fact, as a Victorian passion) and how the contributions of America’s greatest nature writers—from Thoreau to Muir—have changed our relationship to wilderness. Along the way are hilarious anecdotes, like the time White, buck naked, sat on a nest of yellow jackets. As he writes, “With camping you cannot hide.”

After a long and sweaty day of camping, it hard to imagine anything more bracing than a nice, gritty, sour cupful of orange-flavored Tang. But you can make this treat even more memorable if you mix powdered Tang with unbelievably hot water and then consume it immediately without giving it even one moment to cool. Here is an heirloom recipe for Hot Tang, developed by my family when we were camping out in Mammoth Lakes, California. This was the main drink in every one of my campouts from the late 1970s onward. Try it for yourself. Believe me: this is one campground drink you will never be able to forget. Hot Tang recipe: — Go to creek. Get water. Don’t worry if there are bugs, small pieces of grit and floaties in the water. Let them stay in there. They will add character and interesting texture to your Hot Tang. — Put unfiltered creek water in…

… then surely you will look back on whatever happens to you and laugh about it long and hard. For instance, last weekend, when I went camping on Mother’s Day, I set up an impermeable tarp beneath our tent, then a rainstorm came down, the water pooled in the tarp beneath our tent, and we all got flooded out! On the good side, this is one Mother’s Day that I will not soon forget. It will be etched in my memory forever. That’s one of the great things about sleeping under the stars. The memories remain in your head forever, and yet our recollections of discomfort and rushing around, bailing out our families and draping our rain-soaked undies on an oak bough to dry, tend to mellow out over time, like certain bottles of Bigfoot Barleywine. I look forward to getting out on the book trail, meeting you all, and…

My latest news is that Publisher’s Weekly ran a great review of Under The Stars that summed up the book far better than I could, being much too close to the material to sum it up in such an elegant way. And I just found out that the Huffington Post included Under The Stars in its list of six books that make Earth Day every day. And this just in: I found out that my Under The Stars book tour launch is going to take place at Bookshop Santa Cruz, right here in my hometown, on June 20. And please stay tuned for more updates. The official release date of the book is June 20. It will be available as a hardcover book (with my own illustrations) and also as an audiobook. It will, of course, also be available as an ebook. http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

hi everyone. Thanks for checking in again, and please forgive me for taking so long to respond to the messages that several of you left for me on Facebook. I didn’t realize that Facebook had been filtering my messages, and when I checked it recently, I discovered that there were Cactus Eaters related messages in there that had been hanging around unread since 2014! I just wanted to let you know that Under The Stars will be available June 14 in hardback and e-book form,  but it will also be coming your way very soon as an audio-book. Last week I had the exciting and surreal experience of choosing the voice actor who is going to ‘play’ me in the audio version.  In other news, I’m also very glad to report that several writers (including some whose books I have been reading for a very long while) have already read…

As a kind of warm-up for future readings, here is my very first podcast (of sorts) in which I talk briefly about my new book and describe a few of the insane situations that took place while I was researching it. (After you click on the above link, scroll down the page a bit and you’ll see the little ‘play’ button.) http://cactuseaters.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default