The Pendleton Field Guide to Campfire Stories

By Pendleton Woolen Mills

From beloved American heritage brand Pendleton comes this collection of family-friendly tales of adventure and discovery in the wilderness.

This captivating collection of campfire stories is the perfect companion for anyone who enjoys the outdoors. These pages present a range of tales, including daring feats of endurance and strength, epic journeys through new frontiers, and exhilarating encounters with wild animals, plus spooky myths to bring campers closer together around the fire.

Readers will discover works by beloved naturalists John Muir and Henry David Thoreau, modern tales of adventure from Alex Honnold and Cheryl Strayed, and accounts of bravery and heroism from the adventures of Shackleton and the Donner party. With a combination of awe-inspiring stories and Pendleton's beloved patterns and engaging illustrations throughout, this handsome campfire collection is the ideal addition to any adventure and a wonderful gift for families and friends who love camping.

• BELOVED BRAND: For over 150 years, Pendleton Woolen Mills has been one of America's most beloved heritage brands. Known for their woolen blankets and clothing, their products are celebrated by people who love the great outdoors. This thoughtfully curated collection speaks to Pendleton's fans with stories that will elevate any adventure.
• FAMILY FUN: These family-friendly stories are the perfect way to bring everyone together after a day of fun outdoors. Reading the stories together is an easy activity for everyone to participate in, and offers tons of opportunities to bond with family or friends.

Perfect for:

• Fans of Pendleton
• Campers, nature lovers, and cabin owners

• Language: English
• Publisher: Chronicle Books Digital
• Release date: Jun 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781797207674

Pendleton Woolen Mills

Pendleton Woolen Mills is a family-owned business best known for its woolen blankets and exceptional woolen fabric in plaids, Native American geometrics, and bold stripes. Since their founding more than 150 years ago, they've expanded to make womenswear and menswear in a variety of materials beyond wool, as well as a broad range of home and fashion accessories.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

STORIES OF

THE WILD

BY MALLORY FARRUGIA

For those who love to camp, there’s a familiar rhythm: You spend a long day in the wilderness, pitch your tents, and build a fire. Since humans first made fire four hundred thousand years ago, the campfire has been a place of nourishment: We nourish our bodies with warmth and food, and we nourish our minds with stories. These stories awaken our imagination, connect us with one another, and expand our notion of what’s possible.

The stories in this book aim to do just that. In these pages, you’ll discover a wide range of tales—feats of endurance, journeys into the unknown, encounters with wild animals (or their more mythical counterparts), contemplations on the lessons of the natural world—that endeavor to capture the incredible breadth of experience that the outdoors offers us. Taken together, they represent our fascination with wild places and the indelible impression these experiences leave on our lives. Spending time in the outdoors, surrounded by nature’s beauty and power, is a way to connect to our truer selves and to one another. We always come back from these magical experiences changed—and with a story to share.

For some, venturing into the outdoors is a way to break down barriers—personal, social, global. For Alex Honnold, the outdoors is a place to push personal boundaries, defying death on a ropeless climb. As the first American to summit Annapurna I and the first to lead an all-women ascent, Arlene Blum found space in the outdoors to break one of many glass ceilings.

The wild can also be a place to connect with those who have gone before us. Jamling Tenzing Norgay journeyed to Mount Everest to commune with the spirit of his late father, the Sherpa who famously made the first ascent of the world’s highest peak alongside Sir Edmund Hillary. For Bree Loewen, a mountain is a map of her memories: a wedding proposal, a rescue, a tragic death.

For some brave explorers, the ultimate adventure lies in the mythical polar regions: in the snow, ice, or expansive tundra in the extreme north and south of the earth. For Ernest Shackleton, the Antarctic continent was the final frontier of exploration, and he was determined to lead the first overland expedition across it. But the adventure he found proved to be of a very different nature: a quest for survival at sea, adrift on a polar ice cap.

For many of us, like the poet Han Shan, philosopher Henry David Thoreau, and environmentalist John Muir, the wilderness simply feels like home—a home away from the complexity, drama, and never-ending demands of human civilization.

The wilderness is not always a place of quiet retreat, and our experiences there are not always triumphant. Here you’ll find stories—both true and fictional—about mishaps in the wild: a disastrous shortcut taken, a perilous fall, an encounter with an evil spirit. These spooky—or downright terrifying—tales remind us that wild places have a power that cannot be tamed. The natural world deserves our admiration and respect (and sometimes a healthy dose of fear).

Whether you’re venturing to the woods, mountains, sea, or tundra—or simply snuggling up at home in front of the fireplace—these stories will beckon you into a world full of adventure, excitement, and awe. The tales in this book are meant to inspire you to gather around the fire with friends and family to tell your own stories of adventure in the outdoors.

As mountaineer Arlene Blum puts it, Fishermen tell fish stories, pilots tell flying stories, and climbers tell stories of their near escapes. With its many allures—the lure of adventure, physical challenge, exploration, reflection, self-discovery—the wild offers an experience to everyone, and with it, a story to tell. What’s yours?

AT HOME IN

NATURE

6

From Cold Mountain Poems • 2013

BY HAN SHAN,

TRANSLATED BY GARY SNYDER

Much like the cold mountain that he writes of, Chinese Buddhist poet Han Shan is a mythical mysterious figure, as very little is known about his life and work. He lived during the Tang Dynasty, in the late eighth or early ninth century, and was known as a recluse, inhabiting a remote mountain region and writing poems on natural materials. Han Shan’s poetry has long been popular in Japan; it gained attention in the West in the 1950s, when Beat poet Gary Snyder translated 24 of his poems and published them in the Evergreen Review.

Men ask the way to Cold Mountain

Cold Mountain: there’s no through trail.

In summer, ice doesn’t melt

The rising sun blurs in swirling fog.

How did I make it?

My heart’s not the same as yours.

If your heart was like mine

You’d get it and be right here.

THE PLATEAU

From The Living Mountain • 1977

BY NAN SHEPHERD

The Living Mountain, Nan Shepherd’s meditative memoir of walking in the Scottish mountains, perfectly captures the energy and beauty of the alpine ecosystem. Shepherd, a mountaineer, naturalist, and writer, describes the lightness of body and elation of mind we experience when we hike mountains—the fearlessness, the sense of abandon, the feeling of liberation—as she transports us to the high plateau of the Cairngorm Mountains.

Summer on the high plateau can be delectable as honey; it can also be a roaring scourge. To those who love the place, both are good, since both are part of its essential nature. And it is to know its essential nature that I am seeking here. To know, that is, with the knowledge that is a process of living. This is not done easily nor in an hour. It is a tale too slow for the impatience of our age, not of immediate enough import for its desperate problems. Yet it has its own rare value. It is, for one thing, a corrective of glib assessment: One never quite knows the mountain, nor oneself in relation to it. However often I walk on them, these hills hold astonishment for me. There is no getting accustomed to them.

The Cairngorm Mountains are a mass of granite thrust up through the schists and gneiss that form the lower surrounding hills, planed down by the ice cap, and split, shattered, and scooped by frost, glaciers, and the strength of running water. Their physiognomy is in the geography books—so many square miles of area, so many lochs, so many summits of over 4000 feet [1200 meters]—but this is a pallid simulacrum of their reality, which, like every reality that matters ultimately to human beings, is a reality of the mind.

The plateau is the true summit of these mountains; they must be seen as a single mountain, and the individual tops, Ben MacDhui, Braeriach, and the rest, though sundered from one another by fissures and deep descents, are no more than eddies on the plateau surface. One does not look upwards to spectacular peaks but downwards from the peaks to spectacular chasms. The plateau itself is not spectacular. It is bare and very stony, and since there is nothing higher than itself (except for the tip of Ben Nevis) nearer than Norway, it is savaged by the wind. Snow covers it for half the year and sometimes, for as long as a month at a time, it is in cloud. Its growth is moss and lichen and sedge, and in June the clumps of Silence—moss campion—flower in brilliant pink. Dotterel and ptarmigan nest upon it, and springs ooze from its rock. By continental measurement its height is nothing much—around 4000 feet [1200 meters]—but for an island it is well enough, and if the winds have unhindered range, so has the eye. It is island weather too, with no continent to steady it, and the place has as many aspects as there are gradations in the light.

Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity. So on a clear day one looks without any sense of strain from Morven in Caithness to the Lammermuirs, and out past Ben Nevis to Morar. At midsummer, I have had to be persuaded I was not seeing further even than that. I could have sworn I saw a shape, distinct and blue, very clear and small, further off than any hill the chart recorded. The chart was against me, my companions were against me, I never saw it again. On a day like that, height goes to one’s head. Perhaps it was the lost Atlantis focused for a moment out of time.

The streams that fall over the edges of the plateau are clear—Avon indeed has become a byword for clarity: Gazing into its depths, one loses all sense of time, like the monk in the old story who listened to the blackbird.

Water of A’n, ye rin sae clear,

’Twad beguile a man of a hundred year.

Its waters are white, of a clearness so absolute that there is no image for them. Naked birches in April, lighted after heavy rain by the sun, might suggest their brilliance. Yet this is too sensational. The whiteness of these waters is simple. They are elemental transparency. Like roundness, or silence, their quality is natural, but is found so seldom in its absolute state that when we do so find it we are astonished.

The young Dee, as it flows out of the Garbh Choire and joins the water from the Lairig Pools, has the same astounding transparency. Water so clear cannot be imagined, but must be seen. One must go back, and back again, to look at it, for in the interval memory refuses to recreate its brightness. This is one of the reasons why the high plateau where these streams begin, the streams themselves, their cataracts and rocky beds, the carries, the whole wild enchantment, like a work of art is perpetually new when one returns to it. The mind cannot carry away all that it has to give, nor does it always believe possible what it has carried away.

So back one climbs, to the sources. Here the life of the rivers begins—Dee and Avon, the Derry, the Beinnie and the Allt Druie. In these pure and terrible streams the rain, cloud, and snow of the high Cairngorms are drained away. They rise from the granite, sun themselves a little on the unsheltered plateau, and drop through air to their valleys. Or they cut their way out under wreaths of snow, escaping in a tumult. Or hang in tangles of ice on the rock faces. One cannot know the rivers till one has seen them at their sources; but this journey to the sources is not to be undertaken lightly. One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable. There are awakened also in oneself by the contact elementals that are as unpredictable as wind or snow.

This may suggest that to reach the high plateau of the Cairngorms is difficult. But no, no such thing. Given clear air, and the unending