I used to tell my Intro to Backpacking students that to get the most out of backpacking, to become proficient and competent, you need to take three trips a year. Not necessarily big trips, though one should be at least four days. And a quick overnight just to get away is fine, too. Go any fewer than three times and backpacking could become more of an ordeal: even with a packing list, packing can take twice as long as you fret over each item wondering when you last used it and whether it’s still in good shape. There’s more pressure on trip planning: you only backpack once a year, it better be a good one. And what if the weather goes south? Is that it for the year.
Tag Archives: Standing Indian
5 Special Spots for hiking and backpacking
We’ve been thinking about some of our favorite mountain places to explore come fall, and realized that there are a variety of ways we love to explore them. There’s the day hike: spending a day to see as much as possible, then heading home. There’s the basecamp trip: Either establishing camp in a campground or hiking in a short distance in full pack and setting up camp, then doing day hikes from there. Or, there’s the point-to-point backpack trip. Since we all explore differently, we thought, why not look at all three options? So today, we do.
Backpacking squeezes the most out of fall
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!”
5 Hikes Delayed from 2020, Destined for 2021
Today’s post is a follow-up to last week’s post on backpack trips we intended to take in 2020, but couldn’t because of the pandemic.
Face it, are there no bad hikes. Each hike has its own special, well, “charm” may be pushing it. But each hike we do does have some unique or compelling aspect that, in the end, always has us saying, “That sure beat a day at the widget works.” Even when it’s finger-nipping cold, even when it’s wet enough to pack a snorkel.
5 of our favorite Whoa! Moments
On Saturday’s final hike of our 2018-2019 Winter Wild hike series, we decided to add an extra mile or so. It was a mile of trail I hadn’t hiked.
As we made our way up the north bank of New Hope Creek, I could hear the gradient increasing upstream, the sound of water cascading over rock a bit more intense than we’re used to hearing in the Piedmont. As the noise grew, some mild scrambling was required; we shinnied up a rock outcrop overlooking the creek and emerged on a slab 30 feet above the water.