My approach to camping in BC is to never reserve too far in advance. I hate the queues, the website crashes, and I lack the foresight to plan that far ahead. My method is…
1) Check the BC camping reservation website religiously about 3 weeks before we want to get outdoors.
2) Book the first good site I see in a desirable campground.
3) Continue to religiously check for good campsites too see if anything else crops up.
4) Book a better site than the one I’ve previously booked and cancel the first booking.
5) Repeat steps 1 – 4 until we have an ideal campsite in a coveted campground based entirely on other campers’ cancelled plans.
This method doesn’t work well for the seriously coveted camping experience, but it gets pretty close to perfect. That’s how we ended up at Birkenhead Lake just north of Pemberton, BC, and oh boy was it serene! We want to go back someday, but in the meantime we have these purple Lomochrome photographs to help remember it by. (Featuring a few shots of our back patio.)
The shots from this trip showcase some of the first photographs taken with my 1957 Kodak Retina IIIC, created as part of Kodak’s elevated German-made line of cameras and lenses. I bought it used from a local photography shop, and it’s a work of art in-and-of itself. The Kodak had a much steeper learning curve than the Ricoh, featuring fully manual configuration: film loading/unloading, film speed ISO scale translation from the pre-1987 Soviet GOST scale, adjustable light value setting, film counter setting, aperture f/stop and shutter speed balancing, and an adjustable focus.
[Taken May 2022]
