A novice camper

I was never a Girl Scout. Some impressions made at a young age can be very hard to get past. I perceived early in life that I was meant to be indoors. So unlike my Boy Scout older brother, I never joined my North Face-wearing, carabiner-carrying peers on their forays into the wilderness.

To be a college student in Washington and never have been camping is one of the seven deadly sins of outdoorsy people (others include owning no nylon clothing and not knowing the difference between "teepees" and "log cabins" when it comes to building fires). My confession garnered gasps of horror from my friends. Someone probably suppressed the urge to bludgeon me with a Nalgene bottle.

All this humiliation can be a bit hard to take, so last weekend I joined four other Daily staff members in a trip to the foothills of Mt. St. Helens, determined to finally lose my camping virginity.

There are two types of camping: Car camping and roughing it. Car camping, from what I understood, meant driving to a campsite, parking and carrying gear 30 feet to a flat patch of ground to set up. You congratulate yourself on living off the land, before heading to the little building with flush toilets, shower stalls and warm water 300 feet away to wash up for dinner.

Roughing it, on the other hand, means carrying a pack weighing half of your bodyweight while scaling a sharp uphill gradient for a couple miles and finding "alternative" kinds of toilet paper.

Fortunately, we opted for the gentler form of camping, which includced trips to QFC in the beginning and Starbucks at the end.

As it turns out, venturing into the woods with only the barest essentials for survival can be somewhat pricey. In preparation for the trip, I paid a visit to the corporate wilderness that is REI (headed by UW Regent and outdoorswoman Sally Jewell).

As I scanned the shelves, certain camping realities became clear. First, there would be no escaping the bugs. REI stocks more than 15 types of insect repellent, each between $5 and $10 per bottle. There are kits for mosquito, snake, wasp and bee stings and bites, and - I let out an audible gasp of horror - a product called The Tick Nipper, which could be had for a miserly $17.

Then there were the basics. At REI a good tent costs anywhere from $100-$500. A sleeping bag shaped like a mummy's coffin and made of down can run up to $350. The helpful REI employee defended this price by telling me, "A down sleeping bag will last you your entire life."

At that price, it better also cook dinner and give backrubs, I thought.

I was relieved to find mini-rolls of Charmin for $1.40 a pop. Right above the toilet paper was something less tasteful - an orange sanitation trowel for $1.75. The deluxe model of this glorified pooper scooper -- a stainless steel contraption aptly named "U-Dig-It" by someone with a sense of humor -- could be bought for $18.

But even camping, promoted as a get-back-to-nature activity, has its gadgets, including self-heating lattes and 3.5-gallon portable showers. A small stove that can be used to whip up pancakes in the morning folds into a nylon bag that looks like it could be used to store golf balls.

Armed with this slightly limited knowledge of camping essentials, I packed a knapsack and bid the indoors goodbye for a day.

It's not enough to go into the wilderness and merely sleep. We also had to walk. The day was spent scrambling over rocks in Mt. St. Helens's pitch-black Ape Cave, one of the longest lava tubes in the country. After hiking about a mile and a half underground, we five Huskies capped off the excursion by spending the night in a Cougar camp.

In the end, camping was not as hard as I thought. The Cougar campground, near the town of Cougar, Wash., is a placid forest location on the Yale reservoir.

The campground was equipped with a clean and very modern bathroom. Although every tent is a little different, once you understand how to do it, pitching one is not that difficult.

In all honesty, the only living off the land we did was gathering small sticks, stones and pinecones to use as poker chips when we played Texas Hold'em.

It was only after darkness fell and we sat roasting hot dogs around the campfire blazing with QFC grocery announcements that I began to understand why people go out of their way to sleep on the ground in the woods.

Probably it had something to do with the wiener jokes.

"My wiener is bigger than your wiener."

"Oh crap, I burned my wiener."

"Haha...notice how quickly Garrett's wiener got done."

"My wiener got dirty, so I had to go and wash it off."

Despite mosquitoes, the hard sleeping pad and raindrops that splashed on the tent throughout the night, camping was truly an enjoyable experience.

Even for one who claims she was born to be indoors.

Box: Blythe's Blunders

1. Wearing cotton. The fabric that was king in the old south is frowned upon in the wilderness. It's too heavy a material and takes too long to dry. Everything a person needs to wear to go camping comes made of nylon.

2. Decent hiking shoes are a must. "As cool as those shoes are..." the REI employee began regretfully, looking at my apple-green flats with the flower detail. I got the message.

3. Let there be light. Flashlights and lanterns are worth their weight in gold once the fire goes out. "You're really going to regret not having one," the REI employee told me. I forgot to bring a flashlight. And I regretted it.