Old School Cool

North Little Rock man brings back the map. 

By Dwain Hebda 
Photos courtesy of Jacob Slaton

Camp Arkansas lets adventurers plan their route with a retro flair.

Most entrepreneurs these days, when they set out to build the next million-dollar mousetrap, look to technology to help get the job done. So, when Jacob Slaton looked to create something to track all of the public campgrounds in the state, one might suspect that meant hammering out some code, snapping some selfies and churning out an app to do the heavy lifting.  

But Slaton had an even more cutting-edge idea: Go old school with a full-sized paper map.  

“There’s something really cool about seeing the map flat on the table,” he said. “People don’t use maps like they used to.”  

Slaton, 40, created Camp Arkansas as a resource for those with a wanderlust for the outdoors and a passion for camping. A lifelong camper growing up, he’s watched the sun rise all over The Natural State, first with his dad, then his high school and college buddies and of late, his wife and three children. A professional photographer by trade, he got the idea to develop a resource for others seeking the same adventures. 

“Once [my family and I] hit all of the big state parks, we started looking at other campgrounds,” he said. “What we realized was, there’s no comprehensive resource for camping in Arkansas. There’s all kinds of different websites and different apps and they all are useful in certain ways. But to my great surprise, none of them had everything on it. That frustrated me.” 

Slaton started out to write a guidebook, only to find that even focusing just on public sites  — all 201 of them — the project would quickly collapse under its own weight. A map was the logical alternative. 

“The idea morphed into, well, what I really need is a map to plan out a route for visiting all of these places,” he said. “As soon as I started to put things on the map, I was like, man, this is actually pretty cool just by itself. Why waste all this time writing a whole book, when I can release this map that basically has everything I want?” 

Of course, the real question was, how would something that analog be received by a generation so used to grabbing their phones for everything and anything that pops into their heads? Slaton says so far that hasn’t been a problem.  

“Every summer, we do, as a family, a big three-, four-, five-week-long camping trip. It’s out west, usually,” he said. “The first time we did that, I bought all these maps on Amazon and I spread them out on the table. My kids were just fascinated by them because they had never seen a map before. They just couldn’t get enough of it. I was like, man, this is really cool. If my kids are into it, then other kids will be, too.” 

It’s not just kids who are taken with the paper map, complete with the origami-esque folding pattern people of certain age remember having to master. When Slaton showed a demo to his camping pals, they displayed similar enthusiasm, as have retailers who have struggled to keep the map in stock since it launched last year. 

“I started selling them like crazy, I literally had people picking stuff up from my house,” he said. “I’ve sold over 2,000 maps and posters around the state; I’ve got my maps in about 15 different retail shops. I’m about to get a third order of another 1,000 pretty soon.” 

“About 90 to 95 percent of sales are in-state or about 25 miles outside of the state of Arkansas, in southern Missouri and eastern Texas and Oklahoma and western Tennessee. And, strangely enough, I get a lot of sales from Oregon. I don’t know why.” 

Slaton has branched into other merchandise around his brand and is already thinking about the next edition of his map franchise. He’s considering maps detailing campgrounds in other states and knows at some point he will have to update the Arkansas version to reflect changes in the camping landscape. The options are many, because it’s a big outdoors; all the more reason, he said, to capture it as he does. 

“I get frustrated on my computer screen that’s only like a 17-inch MacBook and that’s as big as the screen’s ever going to be,” he said. “I wanted to see things in large-scale, full-sized 24-inch by 36-inch format. I didn’t want to put it on a phone or a computer screen. I wanted the full, big size and you just can’t achieve that on a computer screen or a phone or an iPad. That’s smaller than what you really want.”