When we bought our Airstream in May 2014 our plan was to take it south in the winter and to do a little camp hosting each summer. The summer of 2014 we spent our time wandering the Pacific NW and talking to camphosts everywhere we went to find out all we could about it.
At the end of the summer, it was clear to us that while we loved Forest
Service campgrounds, we didn't want to work for a Forest Service
concessionaire doing everything from cleaning the toilets to enforcing
rules and collecting fees. The hosts we talked to working at state parks
were happy and didn't have to clean bathrooms so we decided that was the
ticket.
In the fall of 2014, we applied for hosting positions with both Oregon
and Idaho State Parks. By early December we had filled our calendar with
assignments for the coming summer.
We started our hosting careers in May 2015, giving lighthouse tours at
Heceta Head Lighthouse
just north of Florence, OR. In June, we moved to Idaho to host at
Buttercup Campground
at Lake Cascade State Park. We moved to
Sugarloaf Campground
at Lake Cascade on July 15th and stayed there until late August when we
moved on to Hilgard
Junction State Park in Oregon for the month of September.
One of the things we learned from our first year of hosting was that it
was important for us to visit the parks where we would be hosting. So we
spent part of October 2015 visiting parks in Oregon and Washington
(where we applied but didn't find anything open that we were interested
in) and meeting the host coordinators. They, like any other boss, would
rather hire someone they have met than a stranger listed on a piece of
paper. By meeting the coordinators we managed to put together a set of
hosting opportunities for 2016 where we'd visited the parks and met the
coordinators.
In 2016, we started the season on May 15th at
Huckleberry Campground
at Lake Cascade State Park. We spent 2 months there and then had nearly
3 weeks
off before heading to Harris Beach State Park in Brookings OR for the
month of August. In September, we spent the month at
Wallowa Lake State
Park near Joseph, OR. And then in October we gave tours of the
Historic
Hughes House at Cape Blanco State Park on the Oregon coast south of
Bandon.
We've found that campers are very curious about camp hosting and ask
lots of questions. The first is, what do you get paid? And the answer to
that question for state park hosts is, we get our full hook up site for
free. In Idaho, you also get an Annual Pass after you put in 100 hours of
volunteer time and that pays your Motor Vehicle Entry Fee at all Idaho
State Parks for the remainder of the calendar year. In Oregon you also
get a state parks pass that covers all of your day use fees.
Every park, in every state asks their hosts to do different things. To
answer the perenniel question of what it is that a host does, I've
written up a Day in the Life of
a host at Lake Cascade since we've spent 5 months volunteering
there. Oregon asks much less of their hosts. In most cases, you only put
in 4 or 5 hours a day five days a week on a specific task such as site
cleaning or selling firewood or giving tours.
I've written reviews of all of our hosting experiences so you can read
about particular gigs at particular parks if you're interested. They're
listed by year over in the left hand column.
Interested in hosting? Check out opportunities at
www.Volunteer.gov
Or search Google for camp host in a particular state park system such as
Camp Host Oregon State Parks.
