A question for the old timers… about drinking in the woods

Hi Renee,

I’m only middle aged but I go to Harriman a lot. That’s neat you were able to find a Rheingold can you were able to date to the 40’s. I have found old Budweiser cans there with the pull tabs which I recall from youth so they were probably from early 80’s or the 70’s (maybe older).

I’m sure people still get away to the woods to drink with friends as I do come across more recent cans too – usually bud light and other swill. I think most people gradually became more eco-conscious beginning in the 70’s with Earth Day, acid rain, etc. Took a while for people to realize the planet isn’t infinite in size and if you treat it like crap – it will look that way too.

In the same way that smoking has gone out of fashion, I suppose littering has become more passe. Not that I’m implying smokers are trashy people.

I love Harriman. Its kinda my playground for hiking and camping thats close enough to home if I want to do quick overnight.  On that note..

Sorry,  I have no answers for your question.

There was easier access. Jeep trails and two tracking. Following two tire tracks into the woods.  People were leaving the cities and getting back to nature. Backpacking surged. Many brought their dirty habits with them. I drank a little, but I carried it out. Places became party spots. Cans piled up. With the ecology movement came more protections. Still, if I go up in the Sierras on say, the 5th of July, it hasn’t stopped.

Thanks, everyone. Yeah, I mean, I’m 48.99999 years old (my birthday is tomorrow!) so I’m not super young. But I was still curious if there was anything an older person could add to this other than my viewpoint of, “let’s get out of the house, away from the world, and go into the woods and drink.” But maybe that’s the explanation after all! It doesn’t have to be deeper than that.

Happy birthday tomorrow

Drinking meant freedom when I was underage. Freedom in the woods? Get to act however you want without the judgment of society on you? Plenty of folks on BPL and elsewhere comment about bringing flasks or high (or low) quality booze on their trips. I packed some liqueur in my resupply cache on the JMT. As soon as I opened the cache, I gave away the booze! No desire after days of hard hiking; I just wanted a cold coke! And as I age, I drink less every year. I’m satisfied with reality.

It’s almost inconceivable that someone would do this in the modern age, but I’ve found empty beer cans deep in the wilderness on many occasions, generally in locations with signs of pack stock.

I actually find that some outfitters are very disrespectful of the wilderness, which seems self-defeating, but they often treat it in a way that seems very old-fashioned, like someone is going to clean up after them. They build structures, litter, leave tents/caches unattended for weeks, etc. In recent years I’ve started to take photos and send them to ranger stations but I’m sure it does no good.

A lot of communities had informal dumps. Before aluminum cans, everything rusted. Rusted cans are desert chic. Often part of an old prospectors camp.. Yard art. As a kid in Cedarville, I’d go with my parents to the dry lake bed looking for old colored glass that had been dumped years ago. For the old folks when I was young, it was normal. Their kids may have carried on for another generation. Today it’s somewhat under control. No longer considered normal. There will always be pigs.

Thank you, Dirtbag!!  🥳

People left stuff in the past before the recycling and things like Earth Day raised awareness.   There is old farm land near us that is now Army Corps land due to the lake.  There are ravines in there with old equipment in them, like water heaters from the 30’s and 40’s.   Old stoves from the 50’s.   There is a scout ranch I orienteer at.  It also used to be part of an Air Force base.  There are piles of old shingles that were dumped decades ago (most are about gone).  There is at least one old “Field Car” that crashed into a ravine!  Car was from the late 40’s.   I started going more remote on my weekend hikes.  The local trail on the Corps land, the trail heads are very trashed.   You have to get about 1/4 to 1/2 mile in before you get away from the trash every few feet.  Yes, there are several “clean up” events a year.  But they can’t get all of it and within a few weeks, it’s trashed again.   Sad that our society acts like that.  But even out at the LBJ National Grasslands, at the conclusion of deer hunting season, there is “stuff” in the woods.  I’ve reported deer stands, portable that strap on a tree, to the rangers.  They know from my orienteering that I can pinpoint on a map where the stuff is.  They go out and remove it.  I’ve also found cases of drinking water, just left where they dropped the half case when they decided not to haul it any farther.   I might go try and find that half case of water and dump it out, crush the bottles and pack it out.  Then there are the beer cans.    Many places I see those, and things like paint cans, way in the woods, I figure there used to be something in there.  There are places on scout ranches where there are old ruined barbwire fences also, and those have more tossed cans from decades ago.  And no trail in to it for easy removal.

It’s straying a bit from the topic of drinking in the woods, but… if you wander the “wilderness” of Alaska, you’ll find old mining ghost towns everywhere. That’s one of the things that makes me laugh when people call it “wilderness” (in addition to the fact that indigenous people used all of the land as well, long before settlers came). It’s really just a fantasy word. The town of Fairbanks, where I live, is ringed with old mining settlements, some quite large. They boomed and then busted, one after another. One in particular we frequent for summer berry picking, and in addition to the old dump heaps, bottles, rusted cans, and the outlines of home foundations, we found a large treadle Singer sewing machine! Just sitting there in the woods all by itself. It was a ways from the main settlement, and we thought perhaps someone tried to get it out, but gave up the struggle (a long steep climb out). It was in perfect condition, no rust, no damage. A bit spooky finding it out there, thinking about the women who may have sewed clothing for their families on it. Now all overgrown with brush and trees. And berries! And maybe a few ghosts; it’s quite spooky down there.

One of my greatest treasures was a dime from 1945 that I found on an obscure saddle east of San Gorgonio. Thinking it may have been new when it was dropped. Or tossed for luck before Okinawa or Iwo. Or not. Trying to figure out the back stories of it all can stoke the imagination.

The real timers out in the woods back before aluminum (and recyclable) cans may be slim pickings now.  Back in the mid-‘70s us bike riding kids would pick up aluminum cans for credit, so your age bracket maybe those in their now-70s and -80s.  Recreation backpacking only became a widespread thing in the late 1960s with the environmental movement and then more stringent regs by the mid 1970s due to overuse.  Before that the backcountry was more of a “workplace”/ it was less because it [a mountain] was there and more “did you lose something?” when talking to the WW2 generation.   Likely they just tossed their cans as nature lovers were a minority.

Think where you have unsupervised car camping (or parking) there’s still trash potential even now but mostly now bottles.

An observation only…

A number of the PA trails where I do most of my hiking include short stints along gravel roads and I’ve noticed a lot of beer cans strewn along the roads.  They are always low-end “common” beers (Bud, Miller, etc.) suggesting that it’s a certain demographic engaging in the littering.  I’ve never seen anything that costs a couple bucks a can.

Fun fact – I’ve been known to use these road crossings to stash a good IPA if our campsite is within a couple miles of the road.  No point in carrying it the whole way (and yes – I do carry out the empties).