I’ve had my eye on Camp Wildfire for a while and last year, I got an unexpected last-minute opportunity to go as crew. I enjoyed it so much that eventually I talked myself into going as a paying customer this year.
If you’ve not come across it, Camp Wildfire is a festival inspired by Scout camp. Adventurous and craft activities are the focus and although there’s drinking and partying at night, it doesn’t tend to get out of hand because people know they’ve got activities in the morning. Everyone is a member of a Patrol, a sub-division of the whole, and you’ll see a lot of people in Scout-inspired clothing. The merch stand sells shirts, badges and neckerchiefs, the latter in Patrol colours, and everyone goes around covered in badges. I’ll mutter darkly over here about how many revellers are putting their money where their mouths are by actually volunteering with Scouts (or Guides of course; we’re just less recognisable).
First things first, uniform. Oh, it’s not compulsory. It’s not even worn by the majority but I had reasons for wanting to wear it. Adult Guiding leaders don’t wear uniform covered in badges and some of us secretly wish we did. Second, that internal mutter over the appropriation of the Scout aesthetic. I saw badges I recognised last year and my enthusiasm at seeing them was universally greeted with a grunt, a shrug and “I dunno, I just got a bag of ’em from eBay”. I wanted to walk around this festival covered in badges with meaning. I also wanted to do it in advance, rather than buy a beige shirt when I got there and either spend the weekend sewing or spend it with no badges. So I raided Primark and came away happy with a navy shirt. My Guide leader uniform is navy- admittedly, the formal uniform shirt is pale blue but when I go to Brownies and Rangers, I wear navy. My Guide badges got spotted by two people – one ex-leader who may go back to it now she’s been reminded, and one Scout leader who said “I see you’re repurposing your uniform too”. I had to admit that while the badges are genuine and I am indeed a Guide leader, the shirt is not Guiding uniform.
It wasn’t until the shirt was 90% ready that I discovered Patrol Leaders wear navy and the hoi polloi wear beige. That little detail isn’t mentioned on the website. Oh, well. Too late. I’m not taking it all off and starting again. I dislike beige, anyway. My shirt has dark green “wings” over the shoulders, guiding badges on the right side, Rebel Badge Club on the left front and travel stuff down the left sleeve. I left space on the pocket for my Patrol-green Camp Wildfire badge – I bought my green diamond on Friday afternoon once the tent was up and spent the thunderstorm sewing it on. Gave up on the solo patch – that’s going on my blanket. Sewing things on pockets is hard. I got a solo pin instead for the pocket. And you get given a campfire pin with the year on when you enter. I didn’t get one last year because I entered the crew/artist entrance rather than the general one but they have last year’s at the Stores for those who’ve lost theirs and because they’re handed out free when you walk in, the old ones are also handed out free. So now I have a 2022 pin because I was there in 2022 and a 2023 pin, both on the Camp Wildfire pocket. A green t-shirt to wear underneath, I wove green craft feathers into a hoop of floristry wire for a headpiece and I gave in and bought a Patrol green neckerchief. If you know Camp Wildfire, I think you can deduce that I chose Hawk Patrol, after not quite making up my mind last year. I also added to the green theme with green nails. Even out of “uniform”, I intended to be a visible Hawk. To be honest, it was spectacularly hot. I wore my shirt as much as I could but I think I spent more time carrying it than wearing it and when I was wearing it, it was more for the sake of photos than because I really wanted to.
Hawks turned out to be a good choice. We were the smallest Patrol but on the occasions I stopped by the Patrol Games, they were definitely the loudest. I never figured out what the Fox song/chant/noise was. The Squirrels had a chant (“Whose nuts? Deez nuts!”) and a song (“We are family/I got all my Squirrels with me”). The Badgers had a song, and a good one (“Ba-ba-ba-ba-ba-Badgers” to the tune of Seven Nation Army). The Hawks had a noise (“KAKAAW!”) and two chants (“Hawks there it is!” and one I can neither remember nor find on the Patrol FB group) and a song (“We built this city/We built this city on Hawk Patrol”). I spent a part of Sunday evening sitting under a tree with an ice cream watching from a safe distance and no question, Hawks made the most noise. Spoiler: we got the most points as well as the most average points per Patrol member (these two sound like they’re pretty much the same thing; given the discrepancy in Patrol sizes, they’re not!) but we lost the final Patrol Games which meant the Badgers took the cup. If you’re not into big noisy things and crowds packed into stands not big enough, there was a Patrol Quiz on Friday and Saturday – that was fun. Arrive in the Auditorium, look for people wearing the same colour as you – instant friends! We came second on Friday and won on Saturday and I’m pleased that I was able to contribute Patrol points while staying miles away from the Games. Anyway, that’s enough on Patrols. What did I actually do?
Well, due to an admin error, I had a lot more activity credits than I should have done and I filled my schedule to the point that I had to print it out and carry it around my neck to keep track of what I was doing next and where. I’m writing this with my Google Calendar open. I wasn’t the worst, either – I saw people on the Dynamo package (unlimited credits) who packed in back-to-back activities from 9-6 on both Saturday and Sunday – but I maybe did more than I should have done.
Activities started on Saturday morning. I went to visit Tom at Capture the Flag first thing and made my way to Stilts for 10am. I had mixed feelings about it. My best friend had a set of wooden hand-held stilts when we were kids and I’ve spent many a year walking up and down her garden path on them. I was pleased to find you don’t really lose it. But performance stilts were another matter. The people had two kinds. One was a great big sturdy thing with long “feet” designed for decorators and plasterers. They looked easiest but they were heavy and it’s very easy to trip over your own feet if you forget to walk like John Wayne (or “a Transformer wearing a nappy”). I found them easiest if I sang to give myself a rhythm to stomp along too – the Imperial March or the Pink Panther theme worked well. I thought the pegs were going to be impossible – they have no feet, they just end in a point and you can’t stand still on them, you have to “tread water” – but actually, they were easier. Whether that’s because they were the lower, lighter wooden ones rather than the really high aluminium ones, or whether it was because I’d already had a go on the big heavy ones and started to get my balance or at least my confidence, I don’t know. But I left feeling like I’d enjoyed stilts and not disgraced myself.
Next was a scuttle across the field to archery battles. You wear a mask, take up a plastic bow, line up with your team and shoot foam-tipped arrows at your opponents, the idea being to hit them. I say “foam-tipped”. These things are about the size and shape of giant marshmallows but they’re reasonably heavy and when you add in the force from being shot across a field, they hurt if they hit you. I took two to the arms and one to the face. I got lucky with the face, the mask spreads the force of the hit and although it’s a shock for a moment, it doesn’t really hurt. In the previous group, I saw a girl get hit in the head and that absolutely took her out. She was half-carried off the field. Very hot, running around, grabbing arrows, dodging arrows, shooting arrows. Luckily, I had a whole half-hour to sit in the forest and cool down before my next activity, aerial silks.
This was the first of a succession of activities that were Not For Me. You need a certain amount of gymnastic skill. No way was I going to turn myself upside down, hanging from a pair of curtains. Not even with two people shoving me! I did manage the one where you sit, get onto your knees and turn the silks inside out to make angel wings and I sort of managed the one where you kneel and twist your foot around, with some help. Actually, that was on a sling. By the time we got onto actual silks, I knew what I absolutely couldn’t do and didn’t even try it. But I could figure out how to wind the silk around my foot to stand up, and how to adjust it so that the stretch of the silk meant I didn’t end up with my foot just flat on the floor. I’m glad I did it, I’m glad I got that out of my system but it’s not for me and I now understand why my local circus school recommends starting on hoops, rather than silks.
Next up was Escape & Evade, which is basically hide and seek in the woods. Yes, I quite enjoyed that, running around in the woods, looking for a suitable tree to hide behind or a bush to hide under. Terrible at finding the hiders, though. And last up, axe skills! We learned about various kinds of axe and related tools and then the instructor showed us how to carve and chop and we made a very rough and ready tent peg, all with an axe. When I did my spoon-carving day two years ago, we covered a lot of this – although once we got into actual carving, we moved onto knives! – so I knew a certain amount about handling and cutting. Axe carving is definitely more me than aerial silks.
On Sunday, I started with the flying trapeze. I’d watched that on Saturday morning and concluded that I couldn’t do the tricks but I trusted the harness and rope and it would be fine. It was not fine. I climbed up onto the platform using the autobelay, discovered that I was expected to stand on the platform unroped, to climb around the struts to get to the centre, passing the staff up there, all unroped. Then I was going to hold the trapeze bar with my right hand, hold the strut with my left hand. Staff would hold onto my belt while I leaned forward, convex-shaped, ie all my body weight over the edge of the platform, and then I’d let go of the strut with my left hand and hold the bar. Now, the bar and the ropes on both sides of my belt (not harness, but admittedly, more comfortable and just as supportive as a harness) were attached in the middle of the rig, a good two or three metres higher – and four or five metres away. These are not holding my weight. The only thing stopping me plummeting is the unroped man holding onto the back of my belt. The idea, of course, is to hold the bar and swing. I’d already decided that listening to the ground instructions on how to hook my legs over the bar, swing and finish with a somersault was just not going to happen. If I could swing and land, that’s all I was expecting of myself. But when it came time to hold onto the trapeze, I couldn’t. Neither could I go back down the ladder because the autobelay, which is kind of like a car seatbelt, didn’t want me to. The only way was to jump and swing but swinging meant a certain amount of freefall.
In the end, the man on the ground had to come up. Three of them held me, I took one foot off the platform and shuffled with the other until it kind of fell off the edge and I swung a little, lost my hold on the bar – my particular stly of upper body strength is not in my arms or hands! – and landed in the net. Honestly, I barely remember what happened, only that the rest of the group were yelling my name and lots of supportive noises, including “you’re a bad bitch, you can do this!” which is something I’ve never been called before. There’s someone in the net waiting to guide you back to the ground and she shoved a Patrol point at me before I’d even realised I was on the ground, while the man on the other end of my rope said he was about to do the very same thing. I did it. For a given definition of “did”. I semi-voluntarily half-stepped, half-fell off a tall platform and landed halfway across the net, which means I must have flown a certain distance.
I had a break for a couple of hours after that and then I went across to Space Science. Much more my thing. An astronomer talked about space and stars and physics, we made a rocket (lit some spray alcohol inside a water cooler bottle; the force went up, driving it into the ground it was sitting on, instead of turning the bottle upside down and shooting it into the air) and we looked at the sun through some eclipse glasses and a special solar telescope, allowing us to see coronal mass ejections and sunspots.
In the afternoon, I did Film Making and Editing. We were paired up and I was paired with a lady who had come with an idea. A prog rock mass-like song and she wanted nature visuals and maybe someone running away. The trouble was, she’d never filmed anything in her life and she wanted to film dramatic zooms and swoops and to swing the camera around on its tripod like a small child who’s had too many blue sweets. When it came to editing, we couldn’t get the song onto the laptops with no wifi and so for the sake of me not sitting there doing nothing, I took the footage and tried to create my own story out of it with no music. To be fair to her, once they got a bad version of the song across (play it into the mic, with all the noise of the festival and of the activity tent not even in the background), she had maybe five minutes to edit and I could see that it probably could have worked quite nicely. We’d found a volunteer to run away from the camera and I’d filmed her walking back towards it and I used those and a black and white filter to make a two-minute music video about a woman who runs away from the world and then comes back. It’s not the idea we set out to film but I’d had to change my plans very suddenly. Anyway, I got a go at Final Cut Pro and I see why all the YouTubers use it. By the time this is published, I should have had my film emailed to me so I’ll stick it in below and you can see what I had to work with. I’m half-tempted to take the raw footage of the runner and re-film all the middle bit myself and improve on it but I probably won’t have time. I got two Patrol points for Film – but so did everyone else. I suspect the people running it were given more points to hand out than they could possibly cope with. Last year, we had eight or ten a day at Capture the Flag, which meant choosing one winner per session. Film were only doing two or three sessions a day, with four to ten participants, rather than up to forty. Well, that meant I earned the Hawks three points during my activities as well as the ones we got for winning the quiz.
I debated whether or not to share this. We were told that the people we filmed had only been told it was for our own entertainment and not to share beyond our friends – but the only person who appears in mine is the official photographer, who was disappointed that there are never pictures of her and was excited to get to appear in a film and wanted to see it. As I have no idea what her name is and how to contact her, this may be the only way she gets to see herself.
Last was tree climbing. I saw this last year and concluded that it was basically SRT with Prussik knots. I did SRT as a student. It’s the caver’s method of climbing a rope. Now, I was a little nettled that the instructor kept pointing out “the magic knot” because this isn’t Camp Kindling, the kids’ version. We’re grown-ups. Call a Prussik knot a Prussik knot. It was not SRT. It was just similar enough to be deeply frustrating. In SRT, you have a cam on a handle that you push upwards. Then you pull up on it while standing in a footloop. That moves a second camp attached around your stomach. You then relax and that cam takes your weight and you repeat the process. In tree climb, there’s no upper jammer. You use your arm strength to pull yourself up. You do have the footloop to help but it’s just a Prussik knot tied below your harness. You have to manually pull it up the rope after every step. In caving, your footloop is attached to your upper jammer so it comes up by itself when you move your jammer up. Everything was so manual! And to release the Prussik knot and let you slide down, there’s a wooden knot-presser on the rope. On my first, deeply frustrating, five or six attempts, I pressed down on this. Step, stand, climb, haul, swing wildly, sit down in the harness, slide down three inches again, find feet on ground again. It was such an exhausting process that by the time I was ready to snap, swear, cry and scream, I was barely above head height. No. If I’m going to do SRT, I want it to be proper SRT. I get that this is good in an emergency but not for the fun of it. Also, I now really get why SRT kits include a chest harness – it’s so that your whole body is held close to the rope and you don’t end up lying back uncomfortably, trying to pull yourself in so that you can start climbing up. My kingdom for a chest harness! And it’s not even a harness. It’s a length of webbing with a buckle at one end that you wind around yourself in a kind of s-shape. I bought my webbing at Hobbycraft and sewed the buckle on myself. That’s how high-tech that harness is.
But once I was down, I was invited to be winched up into the tree and I enjoyed that. I’m not actually scared of heights as long as I feel safe and supported and hanging in a harness with actual seat pads – oh yes, I do have some positives! – was nice. But the bit I really enjoyed was that the winch was powered by an electric drill. Clip in, instructor takes in the slack, fits the drill and then stands there with one finger on the trigger while you rise into the tree on your own private chairlift. Oh, I enjoyed that! I rejected their g-swing, which is a variant on what PGL calls the Giant Swing – you get hoisted up, then a rope is pulled that breaks the chain and you free-fall for a second before swinging wildly. It’s fun but it’s also terrifying and I knew at that late stage in a very busy weekend, it was just too much. Finish on a high, literally, on the winch.
Actually, that wasn’t the finish. I went back to Centrecamp, had an ice cream while watching the patrol games from under the aforementioned tree, then I remember the hot air balloon. Oh yes, there’s a hot air balloon and it seemed to my inexpert eyes, that it was perfect ballooning weather. It was! The balloon was going up, two or three passengers at a time, giving them maybe a minute, maybe ten metres up, before bumping back down. I got to jump the queue – I was a solo and I was paired with another solo two or three pairs ahead. The balloon went up, so easy and so smooth, started to descend, changed its mind, went back up, descended, we bumped to the ground and the balloon promptly shot back up again, so we got a slightly longer turn than everyone else. That’s what happens when you’re in a balloon. You’re at the mercy of its mood and the winds and there’s nothing you can really do to control it.
Then I wanted to run back to Wildkind Stores for a hot air balloon badge – oh, there’s a badge for every activity! – but it was 7.45pm by then and I remembered them closing shortly after 8 on Saturday night. I scurried, up the hill, past the astronomer on his hillside, across the Intrepid Forest, past the Sanctuary and the board games tent and made it, dripping in sweat, just after 8, to find it still cheerfully open. Strava says it was a little over a kilometre from the balloon to the shop. That’s how big this site is. It was something like 1.25km from my tent to the trapeze, I’d walked a two kilometre round trip to go in the balloon and just with the bits of walking I recorded, between Friday evening and Sunday night, I’d done more than 20km. Activities finish ten minutes before the hour (or occasionally half hour) to give you time to get to your next activity. Before you book back-to-back activities, check exactly where they are because sometimes you’re just not going to cover that distance in ten minutes. I only had two back-to-back, stilts and archery battles, and those two were both on the playing fields, maybe 100m apart. Leave at least half an hour.
By Monday morning, I was filthy, muddy, sweaty, exhausted, dented, very glad I’d been but very glad I was going home. Will I go again next year? At the moment I’m thinking probably not. This particularly festival is all about the activities for me and I think I’ve done all the activities that I want to do. They vary a little from year to year but I can’t see them producing enough exciting new activities that I’m willing to spend that much to go, to walk that kind of distance over the weekend and get that filthy and exhausted. The ones I’d be excited about are the ones I can do myself – of course I was tempted by the paddleboarding but why am I paying to go to a festival to go paddleboarding when I can do that at home for free on my own board? Equally, if there’s anything that pops up that I really want to do, chances are I can find somewhere to do it. Elementary ticket is £245 for Veterans. It’s not worth paying that for a fifty-minute session on that thing I’m excited to do plus a whole weekend of time-filling activities when it’s entirely possible I can find a full-day introduction to that activity for £100 and get to come home to my own bed.
So, no. I probably won’t go back. But I’m glad I’ve been, I had fun, I got to try out a load of things I’ve had half an eye on, I’ve learned quite a bit about myself and I’ve had an adventure. I recommend you give it a go too.
And if you want to do things like Camp Wildfire but in a less chaotic way and with someone else’s children, Guiding and Scouting both have their festivals. I’ll be off to Sparkle & Ice before I know it, where both me and my girls will have the opportunity to have a go on zip wires, abseiling towers, archery, crafts, high ropes, astronomy and basically everything Camp Wildfire has to offer except the alcohol. Put your money where your mouth is, fake Scouts of Camp Wildfire – go and volunteer with real Scouts and Guides.