You know why you haven’t gotten into backpacking?
A simple misconception.
When you think of backpacking, you likely think of hiking with 40 pounds on your back all day. In fact, you don’t. If every backpack trip we took involved lugging a full pack for days on end, we wouldn’t backpack, either.
What’s the worst part of a hike?
When it ends and it’s time to head home.
But what if the hike didn’t end and you didn’t have to go home?
That would be backpacking.
Imagine, for instance, that instead of sadly piling into the car and heading home after 5 or 8 or 10 miles on the trail, you pitch camp, make dinner, then enjoy the quiet of the backcountry and the transition from day to dusk to dark. Then, awake the next morning and repeat.
It is the season that inspires our great philosophers. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, wrote: “Notice that autumn is more the season of the soul than of nature.”
Or this, from a more contemporary purveyor of percipient thought:
“It’s the first day of autumn! A time of hot chocolatey mornings, and toasty marshmallow evenings, and, best of all, leaping into leaves!”
Why do we backpack?
We could give you a bunch of words explaining why. Or, you could watch this quick video capturing our latest GetBackpacking! trip, the second weekend of May 2021, to the Shining Rock Wilderness Area of North Carolina’s Pisgah National Forest.
Ready to up your backpacking game in 2019? Or get a backpacking game going, period? We’re ready to help!
First, if you’re curious about backpacking but don’t have any experience, we have two courses designed to get you started.
Now, let’s get into our trips! Unless otherwise indicated, our backpack trips accommodate folks with a range of experience, from recent graduates of Intro to Backpacking through experienced backpackers. Newer backpackers learn from experienced backpackers. And, since we do all the planning, experienced backpackers will be able to get in more than a trip or two a year. Here’s where we’re headed the first half of 2019:
