There is a well-known “Calvin and Hobbes” comic from August 1987 in which Calvin’s dad takes the family camping. In the beginning, Calvin is excited. Fishing, canoeing, and living in a tent? Sounds awesome! But then the sky opens up and it begins to downpour. Everyone gets soaked. "If we live to get home, I'm never going to set foot outside again as long as I live," Calvin grumbles.
Last weekend, at Callisto Farm in High Falls, New York, the scene looked somewhat similar. It was one of the hottest weekends during the hottest month in recorded history, with temperatures hovering around 90 degrees, even outside the city. When it didn’t feel like a sauna outside, it was, of course, raining. Yet over 100 people still showed up to participate in Snow Peak Way, a two-and-a-half-day camping experience the outdoors brand began hosting in 1998 in Japan to bring together its staff and some of its most diehard customers. (Seventeen will take place there this year with some 300 guests each, chosen by a lottery system, plus three exclusively for loyal customers.) In 2018, Snow Peak brought the event to the West Coast; the brand’s US flagship is located in Portland, Oregon. And finally, this summer, it hosted its inaugural East Coast equivalent, just in time for a heat wave.
Founded in 1958 by avid climber Yukio Yamai in the Niigata prefecture, Snow Peak is adored by serious campers and menswear guys alike. My friends who love the brand are both—they forage, climb, and hike in Arc’teryx shells and Salomon sneakers, placing whatever mushrooms they may find in collapsible Snow Peak baskets and sipping out of Snow Peak water bottles. It's gear and apparel for people who appreciate the outdoors, design, and the finer things in life—and who believe that you don’t have to sacrifice the latter to enjoy the former.
On Saturday afternoon, Noah Reis, Snow Peak USA’s vice president and chief operating officer, recalled the “Calvin and Hobbes” comic as ominous clouds rolled in. To him, it wasn’t so much a reflection of what was happening at present—although his Snow Peak chair sank slightly into the mud as he spoke—but rather the American attitude toward camping in general. Here, as Calvin himself laments, to suffer outdoors is to (allegedly) build character. If you’re not roughing it, you’re not doing it right. (Or at all, depending on who you ask.) “But at Snow Peak, our style is very much about making it elevated and comfortable,” said Reis. “How do you bring the comforts of home to the campsite, so you can actually enjoy your time outside together?”
If anything, the weekend put this question to the ultimate test. Despite the objectively uncomfortable weather, I was pleasantly surprised to find neither a single bug nor a drop of water in my borrowed Snow Peak Amenity Dome, and I slept comfortably on a Snow Peak sleeping pad and half inside a sleeping bag Friday night. (If you know me, this is shocking. When my mom dropped me off at sleepaway camp for a week—a week!—I cried so hard I threw up. Until I got the Snow Peak invite, I’d refused to camp with friends.) The weather also didn’t stop campers from tie-dyeing, exploring the area, and grilling yakitori, stoking wet logs with the help of elegant Snow Peak–branded flame blowers.
Most campers came prepared. "The scale of people's setups here is really on point, compared to what we would typically see on the West Coast," said Mike Andersen, Snow Peak USA’s brand manager, who, like Reis, is based in Portland. New Yorkers certainly prize their real estate, and as I admired the particularly high ceilings and square footage of a Snow Peak Living Lodge, I was informed that it costs about the equivalent of one month’s rent. Campers, who traveled not just from the city but all over the East Coast, also rolled up with portable stainless steel kitchens that looked nicer than the one in my apartment, futon couches, and coffee-making equipment that rivaled Blue Bottle.
“If you go to a normal campground, everyone just throws stuff on the picnic table; with Snow Peak, everything is hyper-intentional,” Andersen explained. A Snow Peak signature is to have your tent, and then a small, well-organized living-room-slash-kitchen outside your tent, which you might extend with the help of a tarp.
Later this year, the brand plans to open its own permanent Campfield in Long Beach, Washington, which will have toilets, showers, and even an ofuro, or Japanese soaking tub—its first in the US. Snow Peak owns and operates eight similarly luxurious Campfields across Japan in places like Niigata, Hokkaido, and Osaka, which are accessible year-round, not just for Snow Peak Way experiences, and cost a small fee to enter. (Reservations for Snow Peak Way at High Falls were $100.) One of the biggest perks? Toto toilets.
Some might try to diminish the Snow Peak way as “glamping.” It’s no doubt comfortable, and the prices (and Toto toilets) certainly suggest as much. But the seriousness of these setups—their thoughtful design and the investment they require—begs the question: It’s still camping, isn’t it? Also: Who wouldn’t want to camp this way, if they could? The point is getting outside. If Snow Peak helps get you there, great.
“There are a ton of reasons not to go camping,” said Reis. “We just want to make sure we’re providing a reason as to why you should.”
For Jin Liu, a Snow Peak superfan who flew out from California with her Rimowa suitcases in tow, the brand “allows [her] to do things in [her] own certain way.” (A must, she explains, for a detail-oriented, “nitpicky” Virgo such as herself.) She’s been a fan of the brand since 2018, and this was her fourth Snow Peak Way. It all started, like it does for so many customers, with the purchase of a $13 titanium spork, and she’s since grown her collection from there. As it poured rain, she invited me to join her, her friends, and her mother for some warm noodles that she was cooking in Snow Peak cast-iron pots and eating with Snow Peak bowls and chopsticks. When I asked her if she was staying the whole weekend—as in, not bailing a night early, as I ended up doing because I so desperately needed a shower—she looked at me, confused.
In “Calvin and Hobbes,” as soon as the family packs up to leave, of course, it stops raining. The same thing happened on Sunday, when the weather was about as close to perfect as it gets in the Northeast. Calvin’s family never did have a successful camping trip, much to his dad’s dismay. (At one point, Calvin’s mom even threatens divorce.) But maybe if they’d been in an Amenity Dome, things could have gone differently.
Unlike Calvin, I managed to stay dry, and could be convinced to go camping again, so long as Snow Peak is involved and it’s not a heat wave. I’ve been spoiled, yes, but hey, I didn’t throw up.
