City-dwellers craving a taste of the great outdoors got to rough it when they spent a night camping out in Prospect Park last weekend.
A group of 30 lucky nature-lovers who won a lottery landing them a spot on the unusual campgrounds got the chance to pitch a tent and sleep through a night of torrential rain in Brooklyn’s backyard on Saturday night.
“For the most part, it was like a little getaway,” said Josh Cole, who camped out in a tent with his girlfriend Brooke West, alongside other campers’ tents, in an open meadow just beyond the park’s Picnic House.
Cole said that after he and his girlfriend loaded up their satchels with sleeping bags, flashlights, sandwiches, and playing cards, and walked 20 minutes from their Crown Heights apartment to the campsite at about 6 pm, it was “a little weird” to pitch a tent amongst regular park-goers playing Frisbee and softball.
“But there was a lot of good, quite solitude once people cleared out and you kind of forgot where you were,” he said.
It is against park rules to camp-out or spend the night in Prospect Park, but outdoorsy people got the opportunity to have the urban camp experience as part of the Parks Department’s free family camping program, which has taken place in green spaces in all five boroughs for the past five years.
Park rangers provided the tents and facilitated the camp-out, which consisted of a tent set-up session, an icebreaker exercise with other campers, cooking s’mores over a barbecue grill, and a late-night nature walk on a trail through the park.
Some campers said that the experience definitely was no backcountry camping upstate in the Catskills, but that it was still a good time to sleep out in park — even though there was were no campfires allowed.
“You could still see all the city lights and hear the city noise and you can’t see the stars,” said Manhattan resident Nate Kulick, who is used to camping in Utah.
“But it was still very fun,” added Kulick, who shared a tent with his girlfriend Melissa Wong.
Other campers said that the heavy rains that pounded down on their tents on Saturday night made the experience feel more authentic and the atmosphere more remote than it actually was.
“The rain actually improved the experience,” said Cole, who added that the tents held up well in the rain. “It drowned out the people around you and the city noise.”
