Elk Camp: Test Your Mettle and Find Yourself Now

The headline is grave: “Men are going to brutal boot camps to reclaim their masculinity. How did we get here?”

The story, published by USA Today in January 2024, goes on to describe the growing popularity of programs like California’s Modern Day Knight, where men sign up for “a 75-hour crucible” designed to purge their weakness and release their inner alpha. Why? According to a professor of psychology, “Men feel that their lives are not what they want them to be. And they believe that if they were more masculine, more macho, more ‘beast,’ their lives would be better.”

This is where these man camps come in. In the video on the front page of the Modern Day Knight website, the instructor (a sharp-bearded man whose pecs appear to have been inflated by a bicycle pump) paces in front of a wall of dangling hatchets. Gray T-shirted participants in gym shorts (“open to leaders, executives and entrepreneurs ONLY,” according to the website) listen wide-eyed as the instructor warns that “some level of punishment and adversity lie ahead.” No kidding.

The speech is intercut with black-and-white shots of quaking executives descending into ice baths; clawing up muddy slopes on hands and knees as instructors blast them with firehoses; struggling to perform push-ups in the pounding surf; and watching soberly as what looks like a body bag (no joke) is lowered into a man-shaped hole in the ground. “Men are seeking out difficult experiences,” a therapist explains. In these camps, they find them.

Primal Calling

I’ll admit, something in all this resonated with me. As an urban dweller on the wrong side of 35, I’ve noticed a certain softness creeping in. There’s more gray hair popping up than chest hair these days; more trips to Pottery Barn than the gym; more hours wilting in the glow of a laptop screen than standing vigil over a snapping campfire on a windblown ridge.

Just two weeks ago, I found myself weeping into a quart of Häagen-Dazs during an episode of Downton Abbey. Spam emails offering testosterone supplements began to show up in my inbox. Even my computer had noticed the decline.

So, imagine my frustration when I scrolled to the bottom of the Modern Day Knight webpage and saw the price tag of $18,000. For a 75-hour experience, including the hours you’re asleep. Eighteen grand for three days of degradation and torture? There had to be a more economical option.

Then I saw the dates, and it hit me. The next available Modern Day Knight experience was Oct. 15-18, 2024. A weekend otherwise known across the mountain West as the start of rifle elk season. Why go to man camp, I wondered, when you could go to elk camp?

The Challenge Plea

Here’s the pitch to my fellow men withering in the luxurious ennui of modern life—don’t pay $18,000 for three days on a California beach. Instead, invest $803.39 in an OTC non-resident elk tag (that includes fishing) in grossly overhunted Colorado and enjoy ALL of the suffering, ALL of the comradery and ALL of the humiliation and mud and blood and insults and sleep deprivation for pennies on the dollar.

There’s nothing a man camp offers that you won’t find cheaper and more authentic in a weekend in the wall tent with Uncle Larry. For example:

Physical Pain: You want an intensive dose of outdoor agony? Leave the ice baths in the garage, pilgrim and hustle to your nearest national forest. There you’ll find wall tents full of camo-clad men nursing blistered feet, slipped discs, scope-torn eyebrows and raw-hamburger crotch chafing that will make your stomach turn…and they’re loving every minute of it. No firehose required!

Humiliation: Man camps don’t just address your body but your mind. That USA Today story describes a promotional video from Modern Day Knight in which a participant “wearing big chains across his torso shivers during an expletive-laden rant from a bearded man, who calls him a disappointment.” Ha! You call that mental torture? Try missing an 80-yard shot at a 5-point bull from a solid rest. While your cousin observes through binoculars, records the whole scene in his Skope-Cam and replays the footage for the rest of the fellas that night in the cook shack. Over and over and over again. Sure, you’ll be weeping into your pillow long after your campmates have drifted to sleep, but you’ll wake in the morning with a heart like hardtack, ready for more.

Comraderie Through Shared Suffering

Fellowship: The No. 1 reason men seek out these boot-camp experiences, according to experts, is loneliness. “A lot of men are lonely because they lack the ability to put emotions into words, which makes it hard for them to form relationships,” the psychologist explains. “The inability to put their emotions into words leads to failures in relationships, leads to loneliness, leads to their seeking out these experiences.”

Tell you what—it’s impossible to be lonely in elk camp. Most elk camps, famously, operate under the “room for one more” rule. Which means you need to come prepared to spend several nights in an 12x14’ canvas enclosure with cousins and uncles and neighbors and “who is that guy with the mustache dealing cards anyway?” Heck, if the weather turns, it can easily turn into weeks. Before long, you can identify each campmate solely by the smell of their burps. You know, without opening your eyes, which old guys have turned in for the night by the unique rasp of their CPAPs. You can chart, in intimate medical detail, the complete digestion process of every guy in the tent, intake to output. In other words, you’re no longer lonely. In fact, you’ve had sufficient male-to-male contact to send you fleeing down the mountain in your Jockey shorts as soon as the blizzard shows signs of breaking.

Toys: A key feature in the promotional videos for these man camps is the cool stuff guys get to play with during their experience. The aforementioned hatchets, handgun training, foam sticks they use to beat each other. Cool, I guess. But none of this holds a candle to the man toys in elk camp.

What 13-year-old kid can’t remember the first time Grampa put a sputtering chainsaw in his hands to fell camp firewood? Or Uncle Joe and his aerosol spud gun, launching potatoes into the stratosphere with adolescent glee? Or the simple joy of tossing smoke bombs into the camp stove and watching the gang stream barefoot into the snow? I’m not even getting into ATVs, refurbished Jeeps, snow machines or REAL, LIVE HORSES. If you want to amp up your man juices, just fool around with the masculine implements in an average elk camp for a couple of days and watch your testosterone levels surge.

Inner Warrior Awakening

Endurance: Push-ups in the surf? Crawling up a slope in the mud? Call this “endurance training” in the presence of elk hunters and you’ll need to wait through several minutes of knee-slapping and eye-wiping guffaws before they can answer. There ain’t no place in the elk woods for gym shorts and T-shirts, hombre. And don’t expect breaks for “breath work,” meditation or support circles when you’re hauling a bloody carcass up a vertical, dark timber slope (plus some elk meat too, probably). If you want to discover your personal limits, show up to elk camp. You’ll find them.

Wow, I’ll tell you what. I’m feeling a change just writing this stuff. My inner warrior is coming to life. My sleeping alpha, beginning to stir. Maybe I’ll go down in the basement and dust off the ol’ packboard, lace up my boots and blow a few notes on the bugle, just to release some masculine energy. Yeah, I think I will. As soon as this Rejuvenating Rose Facial Cream Mask is fully set.

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