In Camping, Experience is the Best Teacher

Most of us are exposed to the outdoors when we are young. My first flirtations with outdoors began when my day camp climbed into a big yellow school bus and headed off into the country north of my hometown. On arrival at the camp, we unloaded our stuff, which at that time wasn't much: some toiletries, a pair of pajamas, and some potatoes wrapped in aluminum foil. Camping in those days meant holing up in a wooden bunk house with ten or twelve other kids and going on day-long hikes and canoe trips in the country when the sun rose. At night, our counselor made a campfire; we roasted marshmallows and cooked our foil-encased potatoes directly in the fire's embers. A lot of the time, we dined on camp food in the log dining hall, which included a free-flowing supply of “bug juice” that tasted remarkably like Kool-Aid. Life was simple, and “camping” this way was fun.

Today, life is more complicated. Most days revolve around solving problems and meeting tight deadlines. The desire to get away from it all is much stronger, but there is less time to escape from the duties and other obligations of modern life. This means that trips into the wilderness are less frequent and need to be planned more carefully. There is no yellow school bus to take us there, and basic needs like shelter and food are our own responsibility. Most unfortunately, however, there is no camp counselor to lead the way and light a campfire for us at night.

When my friends and I first set out to experience the outdoors, we went to others who regaled us with stories about it. They told us of the simple pleasures of sitting around a campfire in the evening, of hikes in woods filled with the music of birds chirping in the trees, and of pleasant canoe rides along the shores of still lakes, accompanied only by the sound of water lapping against the sides of the boat. They told us that we needed a tent, a sleeping bag, some food—and to plan where we wanted to go.

With the call of the outdoors beckoning, a destination in mind, and some basic supplies, we headed off in a rented car—with a plan, but with little experience or knowledge of what camping was really about. We arrived at our campsite late, in the rain, and used a flashlight with dying batteries to read the tent set-up instructions that came with the lump of fabric and metal poles that we had spread over the ground. We discovered that it was hard to light a fire with wet wood collected from the surrounding forest, and that we had no other means of heating up our baked beans.

We eventually figured out how to pitch the tent and climbed into bed a bit hungry, but content that we had at least conquered a small bit of nature in accomplishing this one feat. By morning, the weather had cleared, and miraculously we awoke dry and unscathed to the sound of trees swaying in a gentle breeze. We managed to light a fire and boil some water for coffee. But the simple mistakes we made—not pitching our new tent for practice before heading off, and not having a camp stove—revealed that we needed to do more research in the future. Luckily, the weekend turned out to be lovely, and we learned some valuable lessons in the process.

In camping, experience is the best teacher. With a little foreknowledge and advice at the beginning, most of your trips will turn out as pleasant as our first trip did. This site is not a manifesto on how to survive in the wilderness in the event of a nuclear holocaust, nor is it a guide to hiking and climbing Mt. Everest. It is intended to impart some basic information on planning a fun-filled trip—and to help you, the reader, evaluate what equipment you'll need for your adventures. As you gain more experience, you'll develop your own methods for planning your outdoor vacations, but in the meantime, we will be there to provide insight into many aspects of the outdoors. By reading this site, you'll see what you need, and what type of trip you can plan. With every new endeavor, there is new terminology to be learned. Camping and hiking are pretty simple activities, but require some knowledge of what's out there. This site is designed to provide much of this information.

I wish a site like this had existed when my friends and I started out. If it had, we wouldn't have considered camping without a stove, and we would have practiced pitching our tent. We would have done some other things differently, too. We would have brought along better clothes and created checklists for our trip. Basic things like these can mean the difference between a successful adventure and a failed one. There are still some times when the weather turns bad and we forget to take something along, but this has never stopped us from thinking about our next camping trip. And that's what happens when the camping bug bites!