Has America seen its heyday of camping peak? Is sleeping under the stars now on a slow downward trajectory, not unlike the dying flames of a campfire? That’s one of the questions Terence Young examines in this heavily footnoted text tracing the history of camping in the United States.

He provides statistics to back up his contention, including some from the National Park Service that would tend to indicate camping (car camping, front-country tent camping, and backpacking) peaked in 1981 with 11.2 million hardy souls.

But more interesting is the professor’s belief that camping has declined because, well, because it’s gotten too easy and too comfy. There is, he theorizes, not enough difference from home to the campground, with a motorized home-away-from-home with its generator, television satellite dish, shower, kitchen, etc., etc., etc. Car campers also have life easier, as they can bring just about everything from home with them, albeit in a somewhat miniaturized version.

“It appears possible that many of these former campers found their chosen forms of camping to be increasingly like life at home and therefore not worth pursuing,” he writes. “Campers cannot ‘return with a difference’ if they cannot get ‘out’ of their customary world.”

The exception to this trend, notes Young, is backpacking, which saw numbers double from 5 percent of the U.S. population in 1982-83 season to 10 percent in the 1999-2001, a rate that has held relatively stable since then.

“Today’s backpackers undoubtedly use lighter tents and enjoy a wider range of foods than their predecessors, but they must still walk and carry their load. Their camping experience, unlike that of motorized campers, remains in fundamental ways as rough as that of their predecessors’, and therefore the contrast with everyday life is sharp, effective, and appealing.”

Trends in modern camping are just one intriguing aspect of this text of more than 300 pages.

The author also traces the early days of camping to 1870, when the New York Daily Tribune sent a writer north to the Adirondack region “to report that it remained an ‘Enchanted Ground.’” The author, a geography professor at California State Polytechnic University, also describes the advent of magazine stories around camping, and how-to books, including Horace Kephart’s Camping and Woodcraft that stemmed from his days in the landscape known today as Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Heading Out also touches on the end of segregated campgrounds and how the loop campgrounds you find in the National Park System came about.