Getting away from them all
One winter in the early 1990s, while working for an outdoor retailer, I scrounged a tent from the store’s loan stock for a weekend’s wild camping in Snowdonia National Park. Nine hours later, as I erected the borrowed shelter in a howling gale, I found that the flysheet was labelled merely as ‘sunproof’. Hmmm. During the night, the tent leaked like a colander, and a trickle of rainwater that began running between myself and my climbing partner soon developed into a full-blown imitation of the Seine.After a night that felt as if I was in a scene from The Perfect Storm, I squeezed several litres of rainwater from my sleeping bag and retreated to the comparative security of a farmer’s barn.After a much-improved snooze on the second night – albeit while wearing waterproof clothing to stop the sodden sleeping bag from soaking my only remaining dry set of thermals – I woke at dawn to an unusual (but not unpleasant) warm and furry sensation between my legs. The rat roused itself at precisely the same time as I did. I don’t know who was more surprised. I exited the sleeping bag like a ball from a cannon, as did Mr Rat.Since then, I’ve worked hard to perfect the art of wild camping in order to: a) stay dry; b) prevent the need to evacuate to the nearest hotel for local vermin; and c) enjoy all the great things that nature has to offer.
Leave no trace
We live in an age when the world’s wild areas are becoming increasingly accessible. Being able to visit fantastic natural sights before retreating to the warmth and comfort of a well-stocked and centrally heated hotel is almost commonplace: national parks such as Zion in the USA, Torres del Paine in Chile and even Sagarmatha in Nepal all offer luxury accommodation.But wrapping yourself up in air-conditioned sumptuousness and bathing sore feet in a soothing spa serves only to insulate you from the very environment that you’ve come to experience.Another alternative is to visit just for the day and return to a nearby town (such as Banff in Canada, situated within its own national park). However, do this and you can kiss goodbye to spectacular sunrises and sunsets unsullied by roads or buildings.A third option is to use established camping grounds. This reduces the pressure to practice minimum-impact camping and eliminates the majority of concerns about damaging the environment as the basic infrastructure is already in place. However, an organised campsite is still a step away from experiencing nature in the raw. And that is where wilderness camping comes in.The first thing to appreciate is the level of responsibility that comes with the privilege of wild camping. Every tent peg stabbed in the ground, every groundsheet laid out and every stove fired up has the potential to scar the landscape. Take for example the seemingly innocuous act of picking up large rocks to place on tent anchors around your tent. Ignoring for a moment the habitat destruction caused by moving boulders, picture the dismay on the faces of the next posse of backpackers to come across the same beautiful spot, only to discover the tell-tale circle of Stonehenge-style stones. Secondhand wilderness camping is never as memorable as the illusion of being the first to camp in a special place. So if you remember that every action has a consequence, and if you are able to think through every stage of wild camping, you’ll have a better time of it, the surrounding terrain will suffer less damage, and future campers will appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Lighten your load
Wilderness camping has the potential to weigh down your rucksack to the point that daily distances have to be reduced, and your thoughts become dominated by the weight of your belongings on your hip, neck and spine, rather than the spectacular landscape around you. So, the first thing to do is to chuck out every non-essential item. Are those paperback books, iPod and short-wave radio necessary for your comfort and enjoyment? Second, do what you can to reduce the weight of every item of existing equipment. Extraneous straps can be cut from rucksacks, handles can be filed down to stubs and lightweight lithium batteries can replace heavier alkaline cells in head torches. Successfully shaving a mere 100 grams from 15 items in your rucksack will remove 1.5 kilograms from your load.By reducing the weight of your gear, you should find it possible to carry several days’ worth of fuel and food in order to spend an extended period of time in your chosen wilderness environment without hurting your back. (We’ll be focusing on expedition cooking in next month’s Geographical.)With your rucksack now kitted out with essential food and equipment, it’s time to find the perfect spot to lay your head. If possible, start looking for a place to camp well before sundown. If you come across a potential pitch during the afternoon, consider stopping early and making up the time by rising early the next day. On more than one occasion, I’ve dismissed a decent camping place in favour of getting another couple of miles under my belt, only to regret my decision when faced with an acutely angled slope 30 minutes after sunset.That’s not to say that a couple of degrees of tilt is a bad thing. Camping on ground as flat as a snooker table can encourage rain to collect under your groundsheet in a thunderstorm. By comparison, a gentle gradient will enable water to run away. Leave a small sponge inside the inner tent so that it’s always on hand to mop up any moisture that makes its way inside, as well as any liquid spills and condensation. In any event, avoid hollows like the plague, or you may find yourself in need of water wings come morning.How far away from a water source is your campsite? Too near and you risk flooding, or, in summer, you could become infested with midges. Too far away and collecting water for drinking, washing and cooking will become a burden.What plants are underfoot? In many wilderness areas – including Peru’s Cordillera Huayhuash and Arches National Park in Utah – the delicate flora takes hundreds of years to grow and can be destroyed with a single footprint. Just imagine the destruction that several square metres of groundsheet can cause.Most responsible trekking guidebooks include information on vulnerable vegetation. In heavily forested areas, it’s wise to spend a few minutes looking up to see whether your prospective pitch is in the fall line of a collapsing tree or branch.
Order, order
Once you’ve erected your tent, organising your possessions is the key to a happy existence over a period of several days or weeks. Personally, I prefer a ‘wet clothes and boots outside’ rule, in order to keep the inner tent and sleeping bags as dry as possible. The two exceptions come in a) desert country, when scorpions can use a piece of footwear as a place to rest up; and b) deep-cold temperatures, when it’s important not to let footwear freeze overnight. In both these instances, I always bring my boots inside the tent.If the tent porch is too small to stow your equipment and rucksack alongside the food-preparation area, the backpack itself, as well as any excess items, can be left outside. First, however, secure everything inside a sealable, oversized waterproof rucksack liner. I find that limiting each person to one stuff sack’s worth of personal possessions inside the tent helps to maintain a degree of order, and it makes evacuating the tent in an emergency that bit easier.Ultimately, wild camping is perhaps the finest privilege the outdoors has to offer us: when the day trippers have returned home and the lodge-based have retreated to their fireside retreats, the natural environment returns to, well, its natural state: wildlife re-emerges, silence descends and calmness pervades. With the right kit – but more importantly, the right attitude – you can become a part of it.
Nets and skeletons
If you are planning to buy a new tent for your future wilderness-camping experience, one of the most useful features to look out for is a net door, which will prevent insects from spoiling your enjoyment of the evening. If your budget can extend to a design that includes a separate mosquito door, with a second door or panel in the rear of the tent to allow a full through-flow of air, then so much the better. But you can have too much netting: some ultralight models have mesh rather than solid nylon walls. This is fantastic in warm weather, but in ugly Scottish weather conditions, rain can get blown under the bottom of the flysheet and onto the mesh. In cold weather, an inner tent with a high percentage of netting will be considerably colder, so look for one with a design that allows for a fabric panel to be zipped over the mesh panels.Even more important than a mesh door is the skeleton of the tent. Unlike in most camp grounds, wilderness camping often means using an exposed site. A tent with large swathes of pole-less, guy-less, flysheet panels is more likely to bend, flatten or buckle in high winds than a design that keeps panel size to a minimum. Self-supporting geodesic structures are particularly efficient at being able to withstand high winds battering the tent from multiple directions. However, geodesic domes aren’t always the lightest option. Limpet-style hooped tents are usually lighter than geodesic tents, and when pitched tail-to-wind their streamlined silhouettes often perform a more than adequate job of resisting a maelstrom.
What do you do with your bodily waste?
One of the taboo subjects surrounding wild camping concerns the issue of what to do with faecal matter. What one does with stools very much depends upon the type of terrain you find yourself camping on. In many instances, the active layer of soil is in the first few centimetres, so scraping a shallow hole away from the trail and regularly occupied wild camping spots might be the best option. If the location of your hole is exposed to sunlight, then so much the better as the heat will help with decomposition. On frozen ground and on glaciers it can be tempting to hide your deposit under a rock, but this delays the natural process of air-drying. After a nightmare experience with burning toilet paper in Patagonia (the paper smouldered overnight and then spontaneously reignited, coming close to causing a forest fire), I no longer set light to used toilet paper. Instead, I pack it in a resealable plastic bag, stowed in an outside pocket on my rucksack. Others prefer to thoroughly bury their biodegradable, unperfumed, plain paper in the previously mentioned hole.Visit www.lnt.org for some great advice on minimum-impact camping.
Condensation and stony ground
To prevent condensation from building up on the inside of the tent, keep one or both inner doors slightly ajar, even in really wintry conditions. Left unchecked, condensation can start to make everything – from your clothes to your sleeping bag – feel damp. If pitching your tent on sharp, stony ground, think about placing a sheet of plastic, a nylon ‘footprint’ (made by the manufacturer of your tent to match the dimensions of the floor) or your closed-cell foam sleeping mat under the expensive sewn-in groundsheet to help prevent it getting punctured.
Leave no trace
We live in an age when the world’s wild areas are becoming increasingly accessible. Being able to visit fantastic natural sights before retreating to the warmth and comfort of a well-stocked and centrally heated hotel is almost commonplace: national parks such as Zion in the USA, Torres del Paine in Chile and even Sagarmatha in Nepal all offer luxury accommodation.But wrapping yourself up in air-conditioned sumptuousness and bathing sore feet in a soothing spa serves only to insulate you from the very environment that you’ve come to experience.Another alternative is to visit just for the day and return to a nearby town (such as Banff in Canada, situated within its own national park). However, do this and you can kiss goodbye to spectacular sunrises and sunsets unsullied by roads or buildings.A third option is to use established camping grounds. This reduces the pressure to practice minimum-impact camping and eliminates the majority of concerns about damaging the environment as the basic infrastructure is already in place. However, an organised campsite is still a step away from experiencing nature in the raw. And that is where wilderness camping comes in.The first thing to appreciate is the level of responsibility that comes with the privilege of wild camping. Every tent peg stabbed in the ground, every groundsheet laid out and every stove fired up has the potential to scar the landscape. Take for example the seemingly innocuous act of picking up large rocks to place on tent anchors around your tent. Ignoring for a moment the habitat destruction caused by moving boulders, picture the dismay on the faces of the next posse of backpackers to come across the same beautiful spot, only to discover the tell-tale circle of Stonehenge-style stones. Secondhand wilderness camping is never as memorable as the illusion of being the first to camp in a special place. So if you remember that every action has a consequence, and if you are able to think through every stage of wild camping, you’ll have a better time of it, the surrounding terrain will suffer less damage, and future campers will appreciate your thoughtfulness.
Lighten your load
Wilderness camping has the potential to weigh down your rucksack to the point that daily distances have to be reduced, and your thoughts become dominated by the weight of your belongings on your hip, neck and spine, rather than the spectacular landscape around you. So, the first thing to do is to chuck out every non-essential item. Are those paperback books, iPod and short-wave radio necessary for your comfort and enjoyment? Second, do what you can to reduce the weight of every item of existing equipment. Extraneous straps can be cut from rucksacks, handles can be filed down to stubs and lightweight lithium batteries can replace heavier alkaline cells in head torches. Successfully shaving a mere 100 grams from 15 items in your rucksack will remove 1.5 kilograms from your load.By reducing the weight of your gear, you should find it possible to carry several days’ worth of fuel and food in order to spend an extended period of time in your chosen wilderness environment without hurting your back. (We’ll be focusing on expedition cooking in next month’s Geographical.)With your rucksack now kitted out with essential food and equipment, it’s time to find the perfect spot to lay your head. If possible, start looking for a place to camp well before sundown. If you come across a potential pitch during the afternoon, consider stopping early and making up the time by rising early the next day. On more than one occasion, I’ve dismissed a decent camping place in favour of getting another couple of miles under my belt, only to regret my decision when faced with an acutely angled slope 30 minutes after sunset.That’s not to say that a couple of degrees of tilt is a bad thing. Camping on ground as flat as a snooker table can encourage rain to collect under your groundsheet in a thunderstorm. By comparison, a gentle gradient will enable water to run away. Leave a small sponge inside the inner tent so that it’s always on hand to mop up any moisture that makes its way inside, as well as any liquid spills and condensation. In any event, avoid hollows like the plague, or you may find yourself in need of water wings come morning.How far away from a water source is your campsite? Too near and you risk flooding, or, in summer, you could become infested with midges. Too far away and collecting water for drinking, washing and cooking will become a burden.What plants are underfoot? In many wilderness areas – including Peru’s Cordillera Huayhuash and Arches National Park in Utah – the delicate flora takes hundreds of years to grow and can be destroyed with a single footprint. Just imagine the destruction that several square metres of groundsheet can cause.Most responsible trekking guidebooks include information on vulnerable vegetation. In heavily forested areas, it’s wise to spend a few minutes looking up to see whether your prospective pitch is in the fall line of a collapsing tree or branch.
Order, order
Once you’ve erected your tent, organising your possessions is the key to a happy existence over a period of several days or weeks. Personally, I prefer a ‘wet clothes and boots outside’ rule, in order to keep the inner tent and sleeping bags as dry as possible. The two exceptions come in a) desert country, when scorpions can use a piece of footwear as a place to rest up; and b) deep-cold temperatures, when it’s important not to let footwear freeze overnight. In both these instances, I always bring my boots inside the tent.If the tent porch is too small to stow your equipment and rucksack alongside the food-preparation area, the backpack itself, as well as any excess items, can be left outside. First, however, secure everything inside a sealable, oversized waterproof rucksack liner. I find that limiting each person to one stuff sack’s worth of personal possessions inside the tent helps to maintain a degree of order, and it makes evacuating the tent in an emergency that bit easier.Ultimately, wild camping is perhaps the finest privilege the outdoors has to offer us: when the day trippers have returned home and the lodge-based have retreated to their fireside retreats, the natural environment returns to, well, its natural state: wildlife re-emerges, silence descends and calmness pervades. With the right kit – but more importantly, the right attitude – you can become a part of it.
Nets and skeletons
If you are planning to buy a new tent for your future wilderness-camping experience, one of the most useful features to look out for is a net door, which will prevent insects from spoiling your enjoyment of the evening. If your budget can extend to a design that includes a separate mosquito door, with a second door or panel in the rear of the tent to allow a full through-flow of air, then so much the better. But you can have too much netting: some ultralight models have mesh rather than solid nylon walls. This is fantastic in warm weather, but in ugly Scottish weather conditions, rain can get blown under the bottom of the flysheet and onto the mesh. In cold weather, an inner tent with a high percentage of netting will be considerably colder, so look for one with a design that allows for a fabric panel to be zipped over the mesh panels.Even more important than a mesh door is the skeleton of the tent. Unlike in most camp grounds, wilderness camping often means using an exposed site. A tent with large swathes of pole-less, guy-less, flysheet panels is more likely to bend, flatten or buckle in high winds than a design that keeps panel size to a minimum. Self-supporting geodesic structures are particularly efficient at being able to withstand high winds battering the tent from multiple directions. However, geodesic domes aren’t always the lightest option. Limpet-style hooped tents are usually lighter than geodesic tents, and when pitched tail-to-wind their streamlined silhouettes often perform a more than adequate job of resisting a maelstrom.
What do you do with your bodily waste?
One of the taboo subjects surrounding wild camping concerns the issue of what to do with faecal matter. What one does with stools very much depends upon the type of terrain you find yourself camping on. In many instances, the active layer of soil is in the first few centimetres, so scraping a shallow hole away from the trail and regularly occupied wild camping spots might be the best option. If the location of your hole is exposed to sunlight, then so much the better as the heat will help with decomposition. On frozen ground and on glaciers it can be tempting to hide your deposit under a rock, but this delays the natural process of air-drying. After a nightmare experience with burning toilet paper in Patagonia (the paper smouldered overnight and then spontaneously reignited, coming close to causing a forest fire), I no longer set light to used toilet paper. Instead, I pack it in a resealable plastic bag, stowed in an outside pocket on my rucksack. Others prefer to thoroughly bury their biodegradable, unperfumed, plain paper in the previously mentioned hole.Visit www.lnt.org for some great advice on minimum-impact camping.
Condensation and stony ground
To prevent condensation from building up on the inside of the tent, keep one or both inner doors slightly ajar, even in really wintry conditions. Left unchecked, condensation can start to make everything – from your clothes to your sleeping bag – feel damp. If pitching your tent on sharp, stony ground, think about placing a sheet of plastic, a nylon ‘footprint’ (made by the manufacturer of your tent to match the dimensions of the floor) or your closed-cell foam sleeping mat under the expensive sewn-in groundsheet to help prevent it getting punctured.
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