ain't nothing wrong with a little lost and a little bushwack but 25 miles of it may be pushing excessive :stalin-approval: glad you made it out
I climbed up Boulder/Grand Pass right as a hail storm rolled in and then lightning and thunder soon after. I just crawled under the biggest boulder I could and hoped Zeus didn't have it out for me that day.
Nothing better than a near-death situation to make you feel alive, right?
i like camping!
Wanna holler at me and tell me I’m bougie PMC because I go camping?
camping is the cheapest way to have a trip though???
lol, i had a similar thing when i joked about horses being ideal post-apocalyptic transport
apparently horses are physically impossible to keep alive without ultra high-end bougie stabling or something
I mean maybe it's more about being able to take vacation time off to camp? At least, the more you camp, the more likely it is that you are well off. Plus you might need a decent car to drive out somewhere. A tent, sleeping bags, boots, etc. and probably some experience already doing that. Of course, you definitely can do that without being a labor aristocrat or something, but it's just one of those things that skews maybe. Definitely also depends on if it's car camping vs backpacking vs taking months off work to do some epic hiking journey.
Camped all of my life. Have little camp sites all over northern ontario. Used to take any downtime i had to go and live in the bush. Portaging was my jam.
Currently on planning a multi day hike with my wife in the next month or so.
I don't know what state you're in but there are real forests in every state. In the desert states you just have to get up in the mountains
Yeah I camp.
By which I mean I drink in the woods next to a fire.
I like it, I like playing with air rifles, I like throwing whippets in the fire to see them pop, I like lying in a tube in the river with a beer and I like looking at the stars. My least favourite bit is sleeping in the cold, but next time I'm gonna try laying the seats in my car flat and putting an air mattress in there. I'm also not a huge fan of squatting. Last time we brought a whole-ass porcelain toilet, dug a hole with a post-hole digger and put the toilet on top.
Never been as relaxed in my life as when I’m floating on a river.
My mates a plumber and he had it sitting in the backyard for a job that never happened so we thought why not.
https://lighterpack.com/r/biq3b3
I do a bit of thru hiking. Haven't done any of the "big 3" yet, but a few around 200-400 miles. The last few years though I've been spending more time climbing and caving so the only trails I've done recently have been in the "long weekend" territory. I have a friend in CO though and when I get a chance to visit we'd really like to hike the colorado trail. It looks incredibly stunning from what I've seen.
There's this notion that you need to spend quite a bit of money to go backpacking and to some extent there are certainly "trust fund kids" you meet out there, but most people doing thru hikes are just regular old dirt bags. I think this mostly comes from people who do a weekend trip, walk into REI and gawk at how expensive everything is and then just assume anyone who does a lot of hiking is a millionaire. A lot of thru hikers will work a skii season over the winter and then spend the rest of the year backpacking and hitching between places.
For food I like buying bulk dehydrated beans like these: https://www.walmart.com/ip/Santiago-Refried-Beans-Pinto-Beans-Dry-for-Bean-Dip-Low-Sodium-1-86lb-Pouch/1712570218 I go back an forth on whole vs refried.
You can then add hot water (or cold if you're willing to wait half an hour), seasoning, and some oil. Match that with a bag of fritos or something and you've got yourself one of the cheapest and most calorie dense meals out there.
If you have sex in a tent, people outside the tent will know. This has mostly been positive and funny in my experience.
I used to go backpacking a couple times a year before I injured my back in my mid-20s :powercry-2: Now I camp extremely occasionally, but I just don't like camping in a campground nearly as much. Too many neighbors, too loud, etc. I really miss backpacking.
Thanks :meow-hug:
Part of the problem is even if I pared things down to the absolute minimum, I always know that I'm just one funny movement from being flat on my back again, and the back of beyond isn't a good place to be when that happens. So sometimes I fantasize about walking one of the pilgrimage trails in Europe, since I've heard that some of them still have places you can stop for the night all along the trail so I wouldn't have to bring anything with me besides toiletries and some changes of clothes, and if it did turn out that walking for days with a small pack was a bad idea, I would be able to catch a bus or train in a town and cut things short before I hurt myself. But that would mean actually flying over there just to walk the countryside, and that's a hard sell for anyone I'd want to travel with. So that'll likely stay a fantasy, unfortunately.Have you thought about doing it on your own? Especially on those pilgrim routes, there will be lots of people to have the odd conversation with so you won't be that lonely. You might even learn more doing it that way since there will be more pushes to talk to other people! I spent a couple months on my own on a bike trip and I learned how to be alone and some other good lessons.
On that note, how is biking for you? It's not quite the same as backpacking but (for me) a lot of the ~spiritual part is the same: spending so much time in motion that it becomes meditative and going through natural areas.
I've done some solo traveling too and didn't love it. It's fine, but not really something I'd like to do again. I pretty much decided I wouldn't be doing that again without a companion. Biking in the US is a possibility though. I like to get away from roads, but then, there are plenty of rural roads in the US that are very quiet.
Been a long time but I used to camp a lot for boy scouts. Sometimes it was a big setup but sometimes it was space blanket in the forest shit.
One time I camped on top of a mountain 8000 feet up, with a 31 degree night that we didn't expect, and I had a shitty sleeping bag and I was so fucking cold. Half of us had normal shitty sleeping bags and half had either a packable cot or a head to toe sleeping bag
I also did civil air patrol (yyyeah) for a while and we slept outside on a huge hill in camo with no tents hiding from people trying to find us, didn't get found until morning
Glamping, mostly; my partner's not super big on sleeping outside but if they have a nice air mattress and a real pillow they don't complain as much.
Lenin loved hiking, so unless you're driving an F350 SuperMaxx HD with a 30ft trailer to the KOA I don't see how camping is bourgeois. That said there's way too many of those fuckers and they run generators all day so they can watch TV in their air-conditioned $100,000 metal box. So I don't generally car camp unless it's dispersed, in areas that no one could ever tow a trailer.
Most of my long weekends and vacations are spent backpacking. It's really nice to briefly escape capitalist society. No cell service, no transactions, very few people if any at all to ruin the vibe with chud shit. Just me and the bears. :chonky-bear:
Hiking though the mountains during the middle of winter as a high school kid in South Africa. Stopping at different campsites and cabins. It was beautiful, but so fucking cold. Every morning I'd wake up and the inside and outside of my tent was covered in frost. I slept with pretty much all my layers on plus the crappy sleeping blanket. I was very inexperienced and my gear was way too heavy, and I almost fell to my death multiple times. A trail by fire if you will. But damn it was amazing. Beautiful waterfalls, amazing mountains, the views and scenery were incredible. Luckily I wasn't alone and went with a group. Would talk crap and play some cool games at the stopovers.
Ultra-heavy backpacking were I pack twice the food I can eat, and my knees are barking.
Helium balloons can fix this, according to a documentary I once saw. I also learned that coyotes can fly as long as they don't look down.
I haven't gone since I was a kid but I really would like to!
I walked with a bindle up a short mountain and spent a day naked up there. Around sunset, I see a guy walking with two dogs and several little goats off in the distance on the only trail and sprinted back to where my clothes were. Thankfully he didn't murder me.
