So you want to see some nature? Here is Jen and my tried-and-true method for looking at funny looking rocks and not dying. All you need to do is calmly answer 4 simple questions.
Where will you sleep!?
If you’re not just making a day-trip, you’ll need to figure out where to spend the night. We got into camping purely as a way to sleep closer to trailheads and spend less time driving, so even if you’re not into camping, it’s worth checking out what options are available if it might save you multiple hours in the car.
NPS Sites: Campsites within National Parks and other areas in the NPS system can be booked via recreation.gov. These tend to be some of the nicest sites, often having flush toilets and standard equipment like a fire pit and picnic table. The best part is they tend to be right next to the trailheads! These are our go-to option if we can find them, but the most popular ones during peak season have reservations released 5-6 months in advance and get snatched up within minutes! Others become first-come-first-served in the off-season, which can be anxiety-inducing, requiring at least one backup plan in case the campsite is full.
Dispersed camping on BLM land: Did you know that 12% of the surface area of the US is managed by the Bureau of Land Management and that you can just set up camp for free on almost all of that land!? Okay, most of that land doesn’t have any roads leading to it, but there are lots of amazing spots where you can simply drive up and pitch a tent. Some examples we’ve done or considered include Grand Staircase-Escalante, outside of Sedona, and in between Torrey, UT and Capitol Reef.
The upside is it’s free; the downside is it’s primitive. That means no water and no bathrooms (though sometimes nearby trailheads will still have one). If you’re considering dispersed camping, always carry plenty of water, and have a composting toilet or another means of packing out your waste, unless you’re regular enough and near enough to actual facilities to plan it out (in Grand Staircase, we timed our movements with meals and starting/ending hikes).
Hipcamp/AirBnb: Hipcamp is more or less the AirBnb of campsites, with folks who own nice land in nice areas offering it up for strangers to book, though AirBnb is starting to see campsites posted as well. Amenities vary quite a bit, anywhere from true primitive camping (though they usually at least have a portalet) to glamping with pre-made tents, heaters, and public showers. These sites tend to be good deals, but are often farther from the parks you’re trying to see. If you sign up for Hipcamp, use the code JAKED779C2E!
There’s always hotels: Maybe it’s getting cold, or maybe we’re getting soft, but we’ve started looking at HotelTonight to see if there are any last minute deals for nearby hotels going into a camping weekend. Sometimes sleeping in a nearby town farther from the trails is worth it if you’ll wake up well-rested and ready to roll. Our favorite ever hiking weekend wasn’t a camping weekend at all: we treated ourselves to a hotel in Jackson from which to base our Grant Teton hikes. Use code JADENNIE if you’re signing up for HotelTonight :)
What will you eat!?
Naturally, we divide things between breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks, plus of course coffee/tea and evening beverages.
What food is available to you depends on what equipment you have available. Do you have a cooler to keep food from spoiling, or do you need to eat shelf-stable? Do you have a reliable way to boil water? Do you have a camp stove? A fire pit with a grill grate and some certainty that you can light a cooking-level fire?
Folks vary quite a bit in terms of how well they eat while camping, and a lot of that is based on what equipment they bring. We’ve camped next to a family that set up a full-on kitchen, including a gas-fired wok; we’ve also come across folks who just packed a pallet of instant ramen cups (and presumably a way to boil water). Some will make a cobbler from scratch in a cast-iron pan they nestle into the ember of their fire as they eat; some will just re-heat the soup they made the night before on their camp stove (that’s us!). The first time I went camping as an adult, we ate freeze-dried backpacker meals, kinda like an MRE!
We usually do hard-boiled eggs (requires cooler) and bananas + PB for breakfast most of the year, but have been trying out instant oatmeal (requires way to boil water) recently as Fall had been getting colder. We’ll make coffee and tea using our Jet Boil and either an Aeropress (if we have fine grounds available) or a portable pour-over set. Our go-to lunch is an egg sandwich on a bagel with burger fixings, cheese, and guac, but every now and then we mix it up with pasta salad, quinoa salad, or whatever pasta salad or sandwiches the grocery has ready-made. These tend to travel well, since we’re often eating in the middle of a hike.
Dinner is usually reheated soup on the camp stove or something grilled over the fire if we’re sure there’s a grate, but you need to be certain you have a robust fire pit or only mild wind if you’re going to rely on an open fire for cooking. We’ve been known to be more and less sophisticated than that: like going from the trailhead to a fine-dining restaurant to a primitive campsite in Sedona or just eating lukewarm pasta salad for dinner because our disposable cooler ran our of cool in Grand Staircase). Snacks are divided into trail snacks, which are generally healthier fruit, trail mix, or nutrition bars, and car snacks, which is what we binge on after a hike like chips or candy.
Food has (almost) as many possibilities when camping as it does at home, and constraints breed creativity. Think about what sorts of things you will and won’t have access to and, like at home, how much you care about taste/nutrition/convenience/cost tradeoffs. You could be a gourmet chef de camp cuisine, a high-roller with pre-made soups and sandwiches and canned lattes, a cup-noodle and boiled-egg vagabond, or anything in between.
What hikes will you do!?
I gotta admit: there is so much amazing stuff to do in the great outdoors, but pretty much all we do is hike. Recognizing that there is a lot to do besides hike, but I’m really only qualified to talk about hikes, here’s how we decide on our hikes.
First, you have to figure out your constraints. What hikes you do will, in large part, be determined by a) a prioritized list of all hikes available and b) how many hikes you can do. The latter depends on fitness, hike difficulty, trailhead spacing, and daylight hours. If you can comfortably walk 20 minute miles for an indefinite period of time on the sidewalk, you might be able to do 30 minute miles on a somewhat hilly trail for most of a day, or might need a full hour on average per mile if it’s a very steep or technical trail. Do you research on the trail conditions to get a sense of how hard they’ll be, but if you’re in the kind of shape Jen and I are in, the general starting model is going to be 2 mph for however many daylight hours there are - 1 for lunch and breaks.
To determine what hikes there are to do, we use AllTrails heavily. I’ll generally start prepping for a hiking weekend but just searching “such and such national park alltrails”, which will lead me to the top 10 hikes based on number and quality of ratings. I’ll plug all of those trailheads into Google Maps to get a lay of the land (I make a new list within Google Maps each time, allowing me to add notes about trail length, elevation change, and terrain), and also reference the Strava heatmap. The end result is generally the most popular hikes, curated based on which ones are near each other or include parts of one another. Jen then supplements this with her mysterious search methods (I think she just Googles “best hikes in such and such national park”), finding influencers who list their recommendations.
W to end up with a spreadsheet of all our hikes under consideration, with estimated time they’ll take to hike (based on distance, elevation change, and terrain) and driving distance between trailheads, clustered by proximity and with comments about how exited we are for each of them. From there, we can make a Plan A, but will keep the notes in Google Maps to improvise on the fly if needed.
What gear do you need!?
Clothing
Look at the forecast for the period, highs and lows, and make sure you have appropriate clothing for both, and for rain if there’s any chance. If you’re headed out West, dress in layers. In the MidWest and East Coast, temperatures don’t fluctuate that much moment to moment, but in the desert, the sun going behind a cloud and turning a corner to be exposed to a strong breeze can make the difference of 20-30 degrees. You may be so cold in the morning you never think you’ll want to take off your 2 pair of wool socks, but once the sun is beating down on you, you’ll be glad to have the option to transfer your sweatpants to your backpack without causing a scene.
Seasoned hikers will often wear long pants and long sleeves even in hot weather: it keeps the sun off! A thin, breathable long sleeve tee and pair of pants will keep you cooler in the sun than bare skin will, and will keep you from having to apply sunscreen constantly.
Footwear
My personal belief is that you don’t need hiking boots - I do just fine in retired running shoes - but you definitely need footwear that is comfortable to hike in and has decent tread/traction. Being able to trust your tread is vital in some hiking scenarios, like walking across slanted bare rock. And if the terrain is really rocky and you’re not sure-footed, the ankle-support of hiking boots might be a good idea.
Sleeping
Sleeping bags come with a particular temperature rating, which is the lowest temp they can be slept through the night in without additional insulation. Pay attention to the lows for the evenings you’ll be camping and make sure you have the right bag. If you don’t, and don’t want a whole new bag, you can buy a sleeping bag liner that will add insulation. There’s also always blankets!
A tent is a tent is a tent imo, unless you’re backpacking or in very rainy or cold weather. Just make sure it’s big enough for your crew, and put up that goofy extra layer (the rain fly) if it’ll get cold at all. The other vital component people often forget is a sleeping pad. It’s pretty uncomfortable to put a sleeping bag right on your tent floor most of the time! They make things specifically to provide padding in these circumstances! Of course, you can also use other sources of padding. We throw down a picnic blanket for a bit of extra softness before our pads.
Other gear we have forgotten before and you might too
Lighter
Firewood (not all campsites have it)
Plates/bowls/cups/utensils
Multiple light sources
Whatever pot/pan you’re cooking with
Optional stuff that will make your life so much better
A backpack with a waist strap and a water bladder. Most folks know these as camel-backs, which is the brand that went mainstream for some reason, I think as a way to get drunk at outdoor parties and music festivals? Anyway, these will allow you to carry much more water, drink the water without having to come to a complete stop and get your bottle out of your backpack, and do it all without hurting your shoulders from carrying all that weight all day. If you’re hiking for 8+ miles, this is a must imo
A few dish towels: clean up spills, dry dishes that haven’t finished air drying so you can hit the road already, mop the dirt off your feet
Plastic grocery bags for quarantining trash, recycling, compost, and dirty dishes
Portable phone-charger-battery
Camp chairs
1-2 adult beverages/person - not enough to dehydrate you and ruin your sleep
Jetboil or similar rapid water boil - great for coffee, tea, instant oatmeal
Fire starter bricks - I always thought this was cheating growing up in boy scouts but most camping nights I’d rather have a lit fire than my pride. Can often be found in the outdoor aisle at a grocery
Along the lines of the clothing section: a goofy safari hat. Seriously, keeping the sun off is vital for staying cool and avoiding sunburns, which are a great way to make sleeping on the ground that much more miserable
Final prep and pro-tips
Download the area in Google maps so you can navigate without signal (you won’t have signal in most National Parks)
Download the maps in Alltrails so you can navigate offline )if you’re okay signing up for premium)
Go to the National Park Service site for your chosen park to check on road conditions and any other potential closures or watchouts
Go to Recreation.gov for your chosen park to see if there’s anything else you ought to book in advance. There might be cool geology tours! Also, it’s no fun to show up to Angel’s Landing in Zion only to find out they’re limiting the number who can climb it in a day with pre-booked reservations!
Read the top few most recent Alltrails reviews to see if there’s anything special to be prepared for. Is it absurdly buggy in the afternoon? Has the trail been diverted an extra 2 miles due to bear sightings? Do you need a high-clearance 4WD vehicle to make it to the trailhead? Does the view at the top require a scramble you’re not down for? Is the whole thing super technical and requires pathfinding skills and a helmet?
If you’re car camping (driving to a campsite, as opposed to backpacking) like us, you should have plenty of space to bring things that will make you comfortable and secure. We bring at least one pillow each plus a thick blanket to use as padding between the tent and our individual sleeping pads
Like above, but for food and water. It’s no fun to run out of either, and car campers will have plenty of space for both
If you have any chance of getting lost or are hiking within 2 hours of sunset, always carry a light source, extra food and water, and an extra layer. The sun sets FAST out West, and the hike will be more pleasant and safer if you know you’re prepared. Being panicked or rushing because you don’t have a light source and dark is closing in is a quick way to make a wrong turn or twist an ankle, which would really have you in a bind
Never camping without you!
And when is the book coming out? Personally, my idea of "roughing it" is Red Roof Inn (hey, I'm old!).