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Camping 101
billwill
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
Any tips or tricks that you guys can recommend? I plan on doing an over nighter in a few weeks at a local mountain, because I've always wanted to go camping and I've decided to make it happen. What should I consider? What should I bring? Etc.
Also, I already have a sleeping bag, but can you guys recommend any good tents on a budget (and by on a budget, this means below one hundred dollars. I don't need the best of the best...I can upgrade later)?
Also, I already have a sleeping bag, but can you guys recommend any good tents on a budget (and by on a budget, this means below one hundred dollars. I don't need the best of the best...I can upgrade later)?
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Are you car camping? Are you glacier camping/snowcaving? The difference is pretty wide and the advice is not a one size fits all kind of thing.
Ryan M Long Photography
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edit: Since you're going to be out in the wilderness and you've never done this before I'd definitely recommend bringing a friend who's experienced at camping to tag along with you. You don't want to be fumbling around with how to get a good fire going when you're cold and tired and just want something to eat. And speaking of fires, if you're looking into starting a campfire I'd definitely check the regulations in your state on whether or not you can even make one while camping and if you can under what conditions.
How far do you have to hike? What is the elevation gain? In how good of shape are you? What is your actual plan for the day? What is the weather like? Are you likely to encounter rainfall? Do you want to cook a hot meal or are you okay with bringing foods that don't need cooking? What sort of wildlife are you expecting to run into if any? Can you build a fire/are you legally allowed to build one?
Ryan M Long Photography
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Take three people with you. Two to go for help, and one to stay behind with the injured party.
Do not go "out into the wilderness" as so green a camper/hiker. You won't know how to pick a good camp site, you won't know what to do nor have the experience to handle calmly a predator encounter, and there's a good likelihood that you're going to end up a sad story in the local paper or as an expensive Search and Rescue operation.
Something as stupid and simple as a sprained ankle becomes a life or death issue in the wilderness when you're out solo. This post may sound harsh, but there are literally thousands of dangers you are completely ignorant of and will be marching blindly into as you go out to set up your tent and discover nature.
Also, since you're camping in the mountains in an arid region, having a group of people means you can split up your loads, so that you're not trying to carry a tent, water, a sleeping bag, food, clothing and misc. gear all by yourself.
I really cannot stress strongly enough how bad an idea it is to go out on a solo venture into the wilderness as your first real camping trip. Please gather your party before venturing forth, and stick to a national park campsite or some other established, marked, and patrolled area.
Sorry for presenting this incorrectly. I don't want to hike deep into the wilderness or anything, at least not at first, of course. As I said before, I will be very close to civilization (within yelling distance), and I will have a cell phone/cell coverage (though I know not to rely on that).
Bring along plenty of water, a few garbage bags, a roll of toilet paper, a good knife (leatherman tools are great), a camp shovel, a folding fork/spoon thing, a decent lightweight cooking set (usually a smallish pot and pan fitted together with a cup, bowl and plate inside), and some matches in a film case or some other waterproof container.
Also, for starting a fire, nothing works better than dryer lint. That stuff will get a fire going like no ones business.
anyways, that's a couple bits of advice.
have fun, be safe and leave the site cleaner then when you found it.
oh yeah, MAKE SURE PEOPLE KNOW EXACTLY WHERE YOU WILL BE!
man, I have been camping/wildernessing for my entire life and I never thought of that!
That's brilliant!
Arguably, the best car camping is when you have to hike in a few dozen yards so you're away from other campers.
But yeah, technically you're car camping. That's cool. It also means you can do it on the cheap. I'd suggest looking on your local Craigslist or similar to find a used tent, so you can snag something in your price range. It'll probably be annoying to set up at first, but ya gotta start somewhere.
Make sure you'll have water, food, and know what you're going to do for going to the bathroom. If it's an actual campground there's probably facilities for water & pooping.
Camping can be as complex as you want to make it -- or as simple as just going and sleeping in a basic tent. Some people go camping out of their motorcycle, just setting up a bug-screened hammock. I personally appreciate a hot meal, so I have a camp stove. I also appreciate light, and have a headlamp and some lightweight light sources. I typically enjoy a campfire, so plan to purchase wood and have some dryer lint as firestarter handy. I don't usually enjoy sleeping directly on the ground so I have some lightweight camping mats that self-inflate, although a foam yoga mat would make the ground more comfy too. I also like to sleep with a pillow so I tend to bring a small camping one.
I use the camp stove for breakfast and dinner and tend to have a "room temp" lunch. A common lunch for my wife and I is summer sausage, cheese, and triscuits. It's hardy, doesn't really care about being warm, and will at least last the day. I tend to pack a cooler with those blue icepacks though, so things don't go bad. But you can also just look in your pantry to see what isn't going bad (peanut butter) and plan on eating that. Since it's a relatively short trip, you don't need to worry about getting a balanced meal for the couple meals you'll be eating out away.
I like to show up at the campsite before the sun goes down so setting up the tent is simple, and I like to break camp a bit after the sun comes up so the dew has a chance to evaporate off the tent in the morning. I tend to skip taking showers while camping as it's usually a pain and you're surrounded by dirt anyway. In general I don't worry so much about what I'm going to eat, and simply make sure I don't go to bed hungry. The first night camping I usually wake up a bit as it's less comfortable than my bed, but the second night I sleep pretty well. I also make sure I have a ground cloth under my tent (you can use a tarp if your tent doesn't have one) lest I wake up soaked from ground condensation (or rain, which will ruin your evening if you don't have a groundcloth). They work best if they're just a bit smaller than your tent's bottom, so that rain/moisture doesn't catch there and run under your tent.
It's useful to have a knife and fork, in case it comes up that you'd need one. A camping tool that includes them is handy, but you can pack a kitchen one as well. Depending on what you plan to eat, of course. And if you're relatively close to civilization and hungry, it's not bad to just go buy food. You probably want to bring a receptacle for water, though, so you don't have to run to a pump whenever you want some water.
Overall campers are a friendly bunch and you shouldn't have to worry about your stuff being stolen if you step away from your camp.
In that case, a cast iron skillet (with griddle/lid) is your cooking friend. You can cook anything in it; soup, stew, bacon & pancakes on the lid, etc.
Tents can be had for under $100. Always subtract one person from the quantity it claims - so that's a one person tent.
Other gear has been covered, make sure you have firewood, plus lots of matches or if you want to cheat, there's handy fire-starter sticks at any camping store.
As for fires, if I don't want to mess with it and get it up and going as fast as possible, there's nothing I've found better than a cotton ball dipped in vasoline. It will catch instantly if there's some dry cotton, and will burn for minutes. The best part is you can blow it out and use it again. I keep them in a small bottle, or a small pouch of aluminum foil if I want to use it over and over.
I have very little camping experience, but here are a couple of things I have learned:
- 20 degrees might not sound too cold, but it's stupid fucking cold weather to try to sleep in. Bundle up like nobody's business, and don't be surprised at all if you end up needing to sleep in the car.
- If it doesn't make you feel like "too much of a pussy" or whatever, consider strongly an air mattress or some sort of bed roll that provides cushioning between you and the ground. At the very least, try not to sleep on pointy-ass rocks like I seem to always do. You'll wake up feeling like shit if your body's spent all night conforming to jagged rocks.
- Tools: Shovel, at least one knife, and maybe a hatchet/saw. Honestly, depending on where you are and how dead the trees are, I typically found the saw to be more useful for car camping.
- MREs. MREs are awesome. Maybe a tad bulky, but worth it in my opinion, if you're only going to be out for a day or two.
20 degrees is going to be cold. make sure you put the top hood up on your tent (some dudes get the tent up and say 'screw it'), but that helps keep the dew and moisture from dropping on your face while you sleep. do you have a mummy sack sleeping bag? if not, and even if so, have a blanket in your bag, and your pillow on your bag when you sleep, it helps keep warmth in.
for food, potatoes are easy to cook, and delicious. you just wrap the suckers in tin foil, stab a few holes in them and toss them into the embers of your fire for an hour or two. a nice bowl of chili and a potato is great eating while camping.
keep all food in your car, and do not wear heavily scented deodorant or body spray.
bears may approach your tent while you are asleep in it, this is scary. as long as you left no food bits out or smell like something interesting to eat you'll probably be okay.
make sure you can set your tent up by yourself before you are out there camping.
As for the sleeping pads (or puss-pads as my brother calls them), definitely bring it one if you've got the room. Not so much for padding from rocks, but to act as an insulator between you and the ground. Makes a huuuge difference.
Yep yep. Very important. Don't eat or store any food in your tent.
Have had a bear tear through my camp twice, you just wait for it to piss off and hope it doesn't wreck anything important. Worst thing to happen so far was tearing and scattering a box of matches.
Would have been a whole nother story if my tent with me in it had smelt delicious.
Follow the advice on bears. If this is a practice run, I would get into certain habits. For example, anything scented (food, deodorant, toothpaste, that kind of stuff) should be put in a bag, tied to a rope, and hung up in a tree at night.
If your source of water is a running stream, don't drink from it. Bring a filter pump. You should be able to find them at a sporting goods store or a camping store.
I can't emphasize the importance of a bed roll. If you don't have room, then make room. Nothing sucks worse than trying to pack up and hike out when you're sore and stiff from sleeping on rocks all night. I have a Thermarest, and those things are awesome.
Be careful of the sleeping bag that you get. If it's a full cloth sleeping bag, those are meant for indoors. You should have an actual camping sleeping bag, preferably one with a drawstring that you can use to close the mouth of. Sleep with as little on as possible in the sleeping bag. I know this seems counter-intuitive, but the truth is that have the warm air from your body circulating around the sleeping bag rather than getting trapped to specific parts of your body by clothing can make a world of difference. I've done this while camping in the snow and have actually woken up sweating in my sleeping bag. Of course, this does require that you have a sleeping bag with good insulation.
Pack everything in ziplock bags, and compress the air out of the bags as much as possible when you close them. This can seem like a pain, but they are great for keeping things dry, and compressing the air out saves room in your pack.
Also, I concur about bring a Boy Scout Handbook. Say what you will about the organization, but the Handbook is a great manual to have for camping.
Again, if it's a trial run, get a compass and a map, and test your orienteering skills. That way, if you get lost on a full trip, you may have a better chance of find a way out, or at least water.
Bring a whistle and wear it on a lanyard. Three long blows on the whistle is a universal signal for distress/emergency, so if anything happens, anyone who might be in earshot can come help. This is like shouting "fire," though. It's not illegal, but it should only be in an emergency. Don't play around with it.
Have first aid tools handy. Bring antiseptic and band-aids. If this is your time, expect to get a couple of scratches and cuts.
Get a Swiss Army knife. Those things can come in really handy. While the bigger ones are neat with lots of tools, they can also be a bit pricey. You should be able to get awy with a Tinker (that's the actual name of the model in the official Swiss Army knife line).
Additionally it should be hung up a reasonable distance away from your camp.
Really watch the time considering it's your first time out.
Try and have your fire up before sundown and have enough spare wood kicking around to keep it going. As Bel said night will creep up on you slowly.
Since it's your first time out prepare to bone up your first fire cooked meal as well and have a backup just in case.
Also if you are going to do reading and stuff at night, bring a really good reading light, cause reading by campfire is a good way to mess up your eyes by straining them too hard.
Satans..... hints.....
put a tarp under your tent.
bring too many clothes, you can always take them off. Thermals are money.
Whatever food you plan on eating, also take a little more - like powerbars or something - that you won't nibble on until you're really hungry.
bring lots of light. Mag lights are good.
A note on general paranoia:
I usually back a small 'emergancy bag' that has powerbars, a topo map, a first aid kit, dry wooden matches in a crush-proof water proof can, glow stick, an LED flashlight, a pocket knife or multi-tool, water tablets, two metallic (aka "space") blankets, garden gloves, a small hatchet or a folding sawand one of these. Mine also has a .22 pistol, pitch sticks,* a compass, a sewing kit, a spool of fishing line, and a pack of fishhooks, and a local edible plant guide in it, but now we're running to money.
Think of this as a football that keeps you alive. Hold onto this football shaped object and you have what you need to maintain your status as a tool-using, fire weilding primate.
you spend 50,100 bucks on that shit and put that in a waterproof case like this. The best cases have a rubber lining, resist crushing, and float. Take it with you camping and leave it in your car when you're not camping.
You're now much better off, in general, should the shit hit the fan.
*pitch pine is pine that has been struck by lightnining or burned nearly to death. The resulting wood is saturated with sap and will burn wet. match-sized shavings of this are the best kindling in north america.
note: I am not a nut, ok? I just live in wyoming.
edit: another damn good thing to pack in your box is an old pair of glasses.
I host a podcast about movies.
Practise putting up your tent!
You dont have to be able to put up in the dark (yet), but knowing what goes where will save you tremendous amounts of time. Also bring a hammer for the stakes if your going to be camping on rocky ground.
If its your first time camping and you really desperatly want to go at it alone, go somewhere where other campers are closeby to help.
Also:
You will forget to pack something!
Part 1. It only takes a few minutes. If you buy a tent and they've forgotten to include the pole, it's not your fault. However if you don't realise this until you're camping, you can blame someone else all you want, but they're not the ones sleeping in a collapsed tent shell.
Part 2. If you plan on camping more than once, make a list, and update the list when you get home with all the things you missed, as well as all the things you could have done without. If you want to get into hiking or canoeing, weight will become an issue very quickly. Removing things you don't need is arguably more important than adding things your forgot.
I actually worked at work on Saturday. Also I went out on a date with a real life girl.
Can you like, permanently break the forums?
http://www.campingsurvival.com/milwatpurtab.html
Since you're car camping, the worst case scenario is really "shit, I have to sleep in my car." Unless you're in bear or predator country, in which case you should put food in the car and not eat at all in your tent.
I know you're just car camping, but even then it's likely that you'll encounter some wildlife. Don't give them an excuse to seek you out and try to eat stuff in your tent.
One of the moms in my scout troop woke up with a freaking brown bear in her tent trying to get to her bubble gum one summer. She never came camping with us again :P
Sheesh .. our scout troop always had the good sense bear bag - put food/etc in a sack, hang the sack from a tree that's a good distance from the camp. Bears are srs bznz.
Red B/Gold Professor
[15:53] <+juju-work> ArsonIsFun is one of the best people I know.
The larger point is that it's away from your site so you don't have bears trying to get into your tent. Although to be honest raccoons are more likely to eat your food than bears.
Anyway, my tip: write this crap down. Open up a spreadsheet, and after going through this thread and deciding what to take with you, enter it all down in there and take it with you. When you get to your tent and inevitably go "Shit! I forgot my toothbrush!" or "Man, I really wish I had some duct tape right now!", write it down on the list. Add it when you get home, and then use it as a checklist next time.
My wife and I use one that her family has built on for years. At this point it's broken into categories, separated in car camping/backpacking, and has an additional tab full of selectable luxuries. And we still add to it almost every trip (sealable bag for used cloth diapers? Yeah, we'll have that next time).
Oh, I didn't mean to imply it was fool (or bear)-proof - just a method to try and avoid waking up to a bear in your tent.
Red B/Gold Professor
[15:53] <+juju-work> ArsonIsFun is one of the best people I know.
just, whatever you do, don't hang your bear bag up anywhere over your tent.
It's not people trying to act all hardcore, it's just that the number one cause of death for people outdoors is being unprepared. Common sense is not enough for many people, they have no reason to know these things and learning them the hard way once you're out there can be fatal.
We have no desire to see someone become one of the statistics. Everything here is good advice and at least the poster will be exposed to the issues so they can decide what matters.
While this is true to an extent in so far as there is tons of equipment you can live without while car camping, that assumes you aren't going to be wandering any distance from your tent. Unpreparedness can turn an afternoon hike into a wilderness nightmare pretty quick. Having something like what JohnnyCache described in your day pack is an incredibly good idea. To die of exposure for want of a $1 plastic poncho would suck pretty hard.
Probably as useful as any book can be on something as experience dependent as camping. They take 1 million plus kids into the woods every year and keep them pretty safe.
Having it in your back seat or trunk just...good.
I also have ridiculous stuff like shovels and a bumperjack and tirechains and coveralls packed all year.
When I camp-camp, I usually bring along larger, more convenient, and specialized versions, so I don't have to touch my e-box. The e-box is for forgetting about until you are fucked.
I host a podcast about movies.
Yeah, that's the way to do it.
You don't want to finally rely on your emergency stuff to find that something is missing because you used it out of convenience in a non-emergency situation.
Air out your stuff when you get home. You'll be packing your stuff up and likely shoving it into bags, but when you get home, open up you stuff and hang things up like your sleeping bag, tarp, air mattress, tent, etc. This stuff can mold if it's even slightly wet, so even if you think it's not wet, air it out anyway. You don't want to go on this camping trip, pack things up and forget them, then decide that your going camping again, only open up the stuff sack that you put the sleeping bag in and have nothing but little bits of cloth fall out.
Well, it is advice, because if someone has never been camping and is told that you need a water filter, a knife, a gun, a camping tool, the ability to build a fire during a downpour, a way to create a signal, and so on, the dude's gonna give up and never even try camping.
Yes, if you're going hiking in the middle of nowhere you should probably get a map and know how to alert someone if bad shit goes down. But the OP wants to read and write at a campsite. He can get by with a bottle of water and a chunk of sausage. He could skip the tent entirely and sleep in his car with a blanket.
Camping in general is pretty easy; I'd hate for the OP to give up on it because he's afraid for his life.
Always pack a poncho. Even if the forecast doesn't call for rain, pack it. I've found that the weather is a cruel mistress, and will screw whenever she can. Being wet can ruin even an overnighter.
Along these lines, pack more socks than you think you'll need. It sucks being wet, and it sucks even more if you have wet feet the entire day. If your only pair of socks is a wet one, this is not good.
Most of this stuff isn't really a necessity (other than a knife. I would not go camping without a good knife. Ever. You will wish you had a knife if you didn't bring one.) If you don't have access to clean water, I would at least bring sterilization tablets, but it sounds like he'll have access to water. Even if this is his first camping outing, it is flat out dumb to not have emergency supplies, like the pack JohnnyCache listed, minus the extras. The only time you will regret not having it is the time you need it.