About

About Camp Newb

I set up my first tent backward. Not badly, backward. I had the footprint down the wrong way and I was trying to force a pole into a grommet that was never going to take it. A woman two sites over watched this for a while, came across, turned the whole thing around, said something funny, then went back to her dinner. Still the best help I've ever gotten. She fixed the one thing that was wrong and didn't make me feel like an idiot about it.

We started this site because that kind of help is hard to find written down. When I was figuring this out the magazines were full of gear I couldn't afford, the forums would spend four replies arguing about whether my question was worth asking, and most of the articles online managed 2,000 words about camping without telling me one thing I could use that night with an hour of light left. The information wasn't missing. It's all out there. What was missing was anybody willing to say here's what I'd do.

Other campers always did. Somebody at the next site knows why your fly is sagging. Somebody coming down the trail can tell you if the creek's running. People will stand in a parking lot and walk you through their whole stove setup for ten minutes because somebody did it for them once. Best information source in the outdoors and hardly any of it gets written down, because it only happens in the moment, between two people, about one specific problem.

So that's what we're after here. In practice that means answering the actual question. Want to know if your tent is leaking, we'll tell you how to check, not that leaks can have several causes. Want dinner, you get a real meal with real amounts. Want to know which stove, we'll name one and tell you when it's the wrong call. It depends on your needs isn't advice, it's a way of not being wrong.

We also cover the stuff nobody writes down. Where do you change. What the bathroom situation is really like. Whether it's normal to lie awake at 2 a.m. sure that something is in your food bag. Whether it's weird you're not enjoying it yet. Those stop more people than bad gear does. We're not trying to get you up anything. Most of what we do is ordinary, two nights close to home, same few spots over and over, plenty of weekends where the drive was longer than the hike. That's what most camping is and it's worth writing about properly.

If something here saves you a bad night, tell whoever's struggling at the next site. That's how we got it.