Camping is all about having fun, relaxing, and enjoying the great outdoors. However, without a few basic camping skills, you will end up stressed and hating camping. There is nothing worse than watching someone struggle for hours trying to start a fire, even worse getting upset just setting up their tent. There are a few basic camping skills anyone who wants to go camping should have.
Planning and Packing
You can’t go camping without a few basic things and without a basic plan of where you are going and what you are going to do. This is a skill to be able to plan and pack for a camping trip.
When you first start out camping it will take you some time to research campgrounds, and find the perfect spot. You’ll have to use a camping list to make sure you’ve packed everything you need.
As you hone these skills you’ll be able to plan everything is a few minutes and have your bags and vehicle packed in less than an hour. Making camping much better and you’ll have more time camping and less time preparing.
Setting up a Shelter
Setting up your shelter has become a lost camping skill, many people used to go into the backwoods and actually build a shelter. Nowadays all you have a tent that’s easy to set up and takedown. However, even setting up a tent has become a lost skill for many.
Setting up a shelter is more than just setting up your tent. You need to be able to find a suitable place to set up your tent. Making sure you aren’t too far from potable water, or too close to outhouses. You don’t want to be right under large trees, but some shade in the afternoon summer sun is nice. It really takes some skills to find the perfect place to set up a sent.
Then once you’ve found a good place to set up your tent you’ll want to check the ground to make sure it’s as flat as possible, remove rocks and sticks that may damage your tent. Not to mention there is a lot of skill to set up even the easiest of tents.
Just following the directions that came with the tent isn’t always enough. You’ll want to make sure your tent lines are tight and tied with good knots. Your tent stakes need to be angled 45 degrees away from the tent, to make sure they don’t pull out of the ground in heavy winds.
Knot Tying
Knot Tying seems to be a lost camping skill. With tent ropes having plastic pieces that bypass the need for a taut-line hitch, and now you can even buy straps to hook up your hammock so you don’t even need to tie it.
Knot Tying is definitely a lost art. In fact, I’ve seen people tape string to poles because they didn’t know how to tie it up correctly. If you can’t at least tie these 6 knots you are going to have problems when camping.
Fire Starting
It’s amazing to watch some people try to start a fire. Half a box of matches and a gallon of lighter fluid later they sometimes get a fire going. Fire starting is a camping skill that most people just don’t seem to have nowadays.
You should be able to start a fire with one match and maybe a firestarter. It’s even better if you can do it with flint and steel. The key no matter what you use to start a fire is understanding how to build a fire without smothering it.
Too many people throw a bunch of wood in a fire pit light a match and thing it will start burning quickly. Contrary to all those fire safety videos we watched as kids. Fires don’t start that easy. You truly need to build a fire starting with tender, then kindling, before moving to logs and branches. It’s not a quick process to build a fire.
Cook food
When I was in Scouts, I told people that I ate better when camping than at home. No one believed me until I started telling them what we ate on campouts. Steaks, homemade pizza, apple cobbler, homemade donut holes where just some of the meals I made camping. With fast food, and microwave meals people don’t cook decent meals anymore.
Cooking is a camping skill that needs to be brought back. Even easy camping meals require some skills to cook. Just having eggs for breakfast, sandwiches for lunch and hot-dogs for dinner isn’t cooking. It takes skills to cook a cobbler in a Dutch Oven or make donut holes on a camp stove.
Use and Care for Knives
Not having at least one pocket knife when camping is like forgetting to pack extra underwear. You just shouldn’t do it, and when you do you should feel naked. Well, at least I feel naked without a knife.
There are lots of things you aren’t going to do while camping if you forget your knife. Like cutting ropes, making marshmallow roasting sticks, or even cutting up food for eating, sometimes you need more than your camping silverware can cut.
As a camping skill, you need to be able to safely use a knife and take care of it. This means not just using it to cut things safely but how to maintain it and keep it sharp. You will cut yourself faster and worse with a dull knife than a sharp one. Know how to keep your knife sharp. Understanding how to safely cut and carve things while limiting your chances of cutting yourself or others is an essential camping skill.
Basic First Aid
Basic first aid isn’t just a camping skill, it’s a life skill. You need to know what to keep in a camping first aid kit, and how to use all of it.
When you are out camping, even at parks close to cities, you are 10-20 minutes away from any sort of medical help. Most of the time you are a lot farther away. You better be able to take care of any injuries you get well enough to have time to get to professional help.
Read a Map
Many people don’t know how to read a map anymore. With the onset of GPS, no one reads maps. This can cause problems. Many times when you go camping the campsite gives you a little semi-hand drawn map. Well, if you can’t read a map good luck to you. You need to be able to read maps, even hand-drawn ones.
GPS doesn’t always work. Batteries go dead, units lose signal, and sometimes the GPS doesn’t have the map of where you are. This why you need to have maps of where you are going camping and the camping skills to read them.
Read the Weather
With the Weather channel and multiple weather apps for your phone, most people don’t bother to look at the sky anymore for their weather. The problem is when camping you can’t always get cell reception. So you have to be able to look at the sky and get an idea of what’s going to happen. Being able to see and understand if a storm is brewing or just a cloudy day is a good skill to have.
Conclusion
There are a lot of camping skills you can only learn from experience. However, there are a few basic camping skills you should know when you start camping. Things like how to pack, cook, tie basic knots and others. These skills will help make all your camping trips way more enjoyable then if you went out camping without them.
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