I Went to Camp for a Week and Came Home Obsessed With Old Skillets

Hi, I'm Vaughan. If you've spent any time on this site, you know it belongs to Angela. I'm usually the guy in the background holding the fence post. This time I'm the one writing, because I came home from camp with too much to say.

Last week Angela, Bassil and I spent seven days and seven nights camping in South Carolina at the Falling Leaves Rendezvous.

If you haven't heard of it, Earthskills Rendezvous is a primitive skills gathering that happens twice a year, once in the spring and once in the fall. It's a week-long camping trip for the whole family, run by a nonprofit and by the people who show up. Every day there's a morning round of classes and an afternoon round. Flint knapping, buckskin tanning, kudzu basketry with Nancy Basket, blacksmithing, wild plant walks with Doug Elliott. The list is long enough that you have to pick and live with your choices.

Free guide: get the Cast Iron Restoration Guide ↓

I took four fire classes. On purpose.

I spent years in restaurant kitchens. Fire came from a knob. You turned it, and if it didn't light, you yelled for somebody.

So I signed up for every fire class I could fit in:

• Fire by friction with the bamboo saw, taught by Forest Hilyer
• The hand drill, taught by Russell Cutts
• The bow drill, taught by Darry Wood and Alex Kilgore
• How to build the perfect one-match pyre, taught by Forest Hilyer

That's four classes on making fire without a knob. My palms have opinions about the hand drill. I'll leave it there.

We also camped next to Forest all week, and somewhere along the way he became Uncle Forest.

Angela didn't sit still either

There were 11 class sessions over the week: mornings and afternoons Tuesday through Saturday, plus Sunday morning. Angela taught three of them: Herbal Bug Protection, a Children's Herbal First Aid Kit, and Herbal Beverages. Of the two of us, she's the one they ask to teach. If you missed her, her DEET-free bug spray, bite and sting relief, and post-tick liniment are all here on From the Hill.

The rest of the time she was learning right alongside everybody else. She made a bone awl with a rawhide slip sheath with Josh Barnwell, made a killer copper blanket pin with Ronnie Nelson, and learned acorn processing, the ultimate slow food, from Bryan Bramlett.

One class was all three of us. Angela, Bassil and I made bamboo bowls, cups and utensils together with Snow Bear, one of the founders of Rendezvous.

Why cast iron gets its own post

Every instructor taught me something, and knowing how to make fire is about as important as it gets, right up there with shelter. But cast iron is the thing most of us use every single day, and it comes with more folklore and old wives' tales than anything else in the kitchen. So it gets its own write-up. That class was taught by Shawn McElroy.

For all intents and purposes, Shawn is an artist. He's a photographer out of Athens, Georgia, and he also owns land that's part of the collective property where Rendezvous is held. He opened up his own workspace to a group of us for three hours and walked through how he restores cast iron. He restores somewhere between 100 and 200 pans a year. I have restored zero. I took a lot of notes.

A few things that rearranged my brain:

Soap is fine. The "never wash it with soap" rule goes back to when people made soap at home with rough, poorly measured lye. Today's dish soap is mostly synthetic detergent. Wash your pan.

Bacon doesn't season a pan. Seasoning is a thin coat of oil held at its smoke point for about an hour until it hardens. Shawn's oil of choice is grapeseed. He seasons most of his pans in an air fryer on the porch so the house doesn't fill with smoke. I respect that more than I can say.

Collectors strip pans in stages. A lye bath to take off the old seasoning and crud. Then an electrolysis tank, where a low current through water and washing soda lifts the rust. A short vinegar dip, never longer than about 30 minutes. Then soap, a scrub, oil right away, and seasoning.

The electrolysis tank is basically a science fair project that works. A plastic tub, washing soda, scrap steel like old rebar or mower blades, and an old-school battery charger (not a "smart" one). The pan goes on the black clamp. Get it backward and it eats the pan instead of the rust. I wrote that one down twice.

Don't get creative. No burning pans in a fire. No self-clean oven cycle. No grinders or wire wheels. Any of those can crack a pan, wreck it for seasoning, or wipe out what a collector would pay for it.

The part I'm keeping to myself

Shawn also walked us through how to spot a pan worth real money at a yard sale or estate sale. What to flip over, what to look for, which details most people never notice.

A few of the basics made it into the guide below. The rest? I'm not telling you.

If you see a guy in muck boots turning over every skillet on the table at a Saturday yard sale in Candler, no you didn't.

Meet the test pan

I'll make one exception, because this one won't make anybody rich.

This skillet was already in our house. Crusty, a little sad, and the perfect first patient.

Flip it over and it tells you a lot:

• It's a Lodge, cast in South Pittsburg, Tennessee.
• The raised ring on the bottom has small notches in it. Collectors call these "3-notch" Lodge pans.
• "SK" and "MADE IN USA" are cast into the bottom. Lodge started using SK markings in the 1950s and added "Made in USA" around the mid-1960s, so ours came along sometime after that.
• The "5" up top is the size, roughly an 8-inch skillet. The "D" is generally read as a foundry mark, not a size or a date.

Is it valuable? No. It's a good old pan that deserves to be cooked in, and it's worth a lot more on our stove than on eBay. The ones I'm not telling you about are a different story.

After

Get the notes

I turned three hours of scribbles into our Cast Iron Restoration Guide: the four ways to strip a pan, how to set up a lye bath and an electrolysis tank safely, how to season, everyday care, and the myths that just won't die.

Huge thanks to Shawn McElroy of Athens, Georgia, for teaching the class and for giving me the backbone of everything in that guide. The good parts are his. Any mistakes are mine.

We'll be back. Rendezvous runs again in the spring, and I have a feeling there are a few more classes with my name on them.

Vaughan