The camps where the men stayed during the cutting and driving seasons were very uncomfortable. There were usually two buildings: a cook-house and a bunk-house. Sometimes there was a smaller building called the "van" where the men bought small personal supplies. All of the buildings were usually made from logs and sticks. The bunks were small and built along the sides of the bunkhouse. If a man wanted a mattress he was charged 25 cents a month for it. The bunkhouses were often overcrowded and dirty. There were hardly any good washing or toilet facilities. At night the only light came from smoky oil lamps. In the wintertime the camps were freezing cold. The loggers preferred to sleep two to a bunk for extra warmth. The dirt and the difficulty of washing clothes made the camps a breeding ground for lice. Here is how one logger described it:

Lousy? Yes, everything you could mention. Anything that would crawl you'd get in the woods. There was no getting rid of them. Lots of fellows would wash their things...and by Saturday night you'd be lousy again. When you would leave to go home you would go into the van and get a clean suit of underwear and throw out your old stuff. By the time you got home all your clothes would be lousy again; everything even your socks....Mom would take our things and put them in Jeyes fluid and then you would have a good wash, comb your head and use stuff in it. Perhaps you'd still be lousy when you went back in the woods again to work.⁶

Because of this many men slept on freshly cut boughs instead of the mattresses. But the boughs quickly dried out and became uncomfortable.

There was usually plenty of food in the camps but it was mostly the same. The loggers' diet was made up mainly of beans, bread, tea, salt fish, rolled oats, fatback pork, potatoes and turnips. The most common food by far was beans. This song describes how the men felt about so many beans:

It was nice to find a camp with good wood, 
And also the cook if he cooked up good food.
In this we were lucky, our cook did his best,
For beans was the main thing, we could manage the rest.
And it was hard, hard times.
We would have them for breakfast, in the lunch boxes too,
And also for supper you might get a few.
But the beans they were thousands, they were there by galore,
Even the bucksaw would sing, "Come on with some more."⁷