I do not like the wilderness

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

Amen!

In my youth, I used to try to be a good sport. My husband loved hiking and camping, and we had a couple of friends who were even more enthusiastic than he was. We would load up huge backpacks with improbably heavy loads of equipment and unpalatable foods and hike up brutally steep trails until we reached a breathtakingly scenic and pristine chunk of Nature. We would then scramble to find reasonably flat (but always exceptionally hard) patches of ground and pitch our tents, gather wood, build a campfire, haul water, reconstitute some of our awful food, and clean everything and stow the food away from the tents in a place animals couldn’t get into it. Then it would be time to go to “bed” in sleeping bags that left you cold yet sweaty by morning. And I would always, always wake up in the middle of the night and have to make my way into the freezing, pitch-dark woods to pee, carrying a little flashlight I usually dropped while trying to wrestle my pants down and then up.

After our friends broke up and the one who got custody of us started seeing someone who wasn’t a keen outdoorsman, we switched to car camping, which had all of the above fun but fewer blisters and sometimes a blow-up mattress that invariably deflated in the night. My husband continued to cajole me into going camping about once a year, until the year he talked me into taking a preschooler and a toddler in diapers camping. There was an absolute cloud of mosquitoes around our campsite the first day, it rained all day the next, and then I got altitude sickness.

I finally laid down the law and told him that if I have to cook food or wash dishes, it’s not a vacation.

As a young teenager, Mr. Legend contracted typhoid on a Boy Scout hike, probably from a stream. No, thank you.

22

When we were younger, my husband and I did a fair bit of camping (car camping, meaning we had all our stuff near to hand, and could easily set up our tent etc.).

We didn’t have any particular issues with bugs or other critters (and in fact, on one trip, I was within about 30 feet of a huge bull moose, as he strolled through our campsite). I hated the “go down the road to the bathroom” part, but could deal with it.

I’m pretty much OVER that. Last time I stayed in a tent was at a Girl Scout event with my daughter. That was likely about 14 years ago. The troop did an overnight trip to Wildwood, NJ, where scout troops (boy and girl) could pitch tents on the beach.

Huge hassle. We were there only one night, slept badly, then it started raining just as we were taking the tents down the next morning.

The troop leaders decided that one night was bad, so somehow TWO nights would be better (I could understand their logic; the ratio of hauling / pitching to sleeping / having fun was improved). But I said “I’ll drive. And chaperone. But I’m staying in a hotel”.

It monsooned the week before. As I helped the others haul their tents, and set them up, we struggled to find a place that did not have visible standing water. And at 2 AM, they called and said “Our tent just blew down, can we come to your hotel?”.

I’ll happily spend the daytime out in the woods, if there’s a picnic table and some friends nearby, but at night I’m going back to a hotel. If for no other reason than I genuinely could not deal with a sleeping bag / mattress on the floor - I’m too old and creaky to be able to stand up from that. An RV might be a compromise.

Pity, really - camping (once we’d bought all the needed equipment) was a very economical way to travel. We did a month-long road trip in the mid 80s, and camped roughly a third of our nights (the others were either mooching off of friends’ living room floors, or motels on the really long driving days).

On the plus side, you likely had places nearby to bury his body. Which would have been a very reasonable reaction to his persuading you to that sort of folly. I would never have dared to do camping (at least not tent camping) with kids in diapers.

23

Camping? yeah nah.

24

Yeah, well, it’s a plant, they do that.

It’s just that kudzu does it more rapidly and with more persistence than most.

25

I live rural mountains but come to the city when I have too. I’m very uncomfortable with all the people and especially cars around.

My driving mode has to change significantly when I’m in the city (that would be Denver)

And two legged critters are more dangerous than 4 legged ones. At least IMHO.

The closest town I live to is a ski resort. And while tourists can be kind of annoying, they are pretty benign. They are there to have fun. DON’T go into town during Christmas time or Spring Break.

26

@Dung_Beetle

In case your ears weren’t burning.

It’s always nice to know you have yet another fan.

27

Camping as a form of recreation at state parks can be fun. Camping, as in some bivouac in connection with the military? Much much less so.

28

I’ve been told you can actually hear kudzu growing if you’re patient enough.

I would assume it’s taken over your body by that time, though.

29

They were! And now I know what happened to Pedro.

My husband and I have done some hiking and camping, but not for years. We have one more trip on the bucket list, because he would like to see Colorado’s Chicago Basin once more. I mean, so would I, but I do dread the climb, and also having to use the bathroom outdoors becomes less appealing every day.

30

If by “camping” you mean that whole sleep on the ground, battling bugs and ruining your food over a campfire, then I agree. If you include a well-equipped RV, then we must disagree. I had three different RVs over a 25 year period and enjoyed them very much.

31

Our favorite vacations are strapping a (hopefully lightish) backpack on and putting in a full day hiking into the wilderness. 8-12 miles is usually a good amount since there is typically a couple passes/ridges to get up and over. 2-3 nights out is fantastic, although we do longer when we can. Unfortunately, it’s hard to swing more than a couple of these trips a year. Retirement will allow a lot more of this, along with long, extended bike packing trips.

Another thing we like to do is go to some remote trailhead and camp there (a lot have small Forest Service (FS) campgrounds). Wake up and have a hearty breakfast, then strap on the daypacks with water, water filter, plenty of food, and go out for a long day-hike, hopefully a loop if possible. We’ve done up to 16 miles and seen some amazing stuff in these excursions. Come back to the campsite exhausted, make dinner, and drink some liquid ibuprofen (beer) around the campfire.

I also love hopping on my dual-sport and exploring FS roads and finding fire lookouts.

We are still stuck to the lowlands and river canyons. 4th of July weekend is typically when we can get in to the higher elevations.

32

One of my fondest memories is of awakening in a sodden tent by a river in the Black Canyon of the Gunnison on a lovely 40F degree morning, preparing a camp breakfast to fortify me for a several mile hike up a mountainside with a heavy pack, in the knowledge that a motel room with a soft bed awaited.

33

These dogs have the right idea:

34

I’m a complete city slicker, and I don’t like roughing it much at all. The last time I slept outdoors was at camp in 1987. When I travel, I don’t mind staying in a smaller town (hell, Welshpool may well qualify as a village, for all its amenities) for a couple of days, as a breather between big cities. But I often say that my idea of a dream vacation is hitting the streets of some European capital armed with just a subway map and a camera. I’ve gone up Snowdon and the Great Orme, and I’ll take a bus tour out to see ruins and castles. But when I get back at the end of the day, I need four walls, hot food and a wifi signal.

And that’s not a knock on people who enjoy roughing it. I have a friend who works as a nurse in some remote northern Ontario community (they rotate staff in and out of the boonies so she does some weeks there, then back to Toronto, lather rinse repeat), and loves to camp, and she posts photos of herself happily snowshoe-ing back to a tent in the woods and I shudder while sitting in front of my computer at (heated) home. But bless 'er, she loves it and more people should have hobbies they truly enjoy.

I sometimes wish I could do without at least some of the creature comforts. I’m single and hence surf the various personals apps, and it’s with sadness that I often find myself swiping left on a profile because all of the woman’s pics feature her portaging a canoe or hiking Machu Picchu. “She’s goth (great), likes horror movies (awesome) and…spend weekends in Muskoka all summer (womp womp).” My loss, I guess.

35

Goths and camping? I guess the two don’t have to be mutually exclusive, but to be honest I’ve never ever seen any goth types in the wilderness, or even very far from urban areas for that matter.

36

I’ve been on longish backpacking trips – no more than two weeks – and I’d do it again in a second if someone else would do the planning, shopping, packing, mapping etc. And ugh, the driving. God I hate driving. Getting there with the right gear and not one extra thing to carry is the part I just cannot do any more. My husband is incapable of any of those things, so the burden is entirely mine. Long ago I used to have backpacking girlfriends and we would divvy up the responsibilities. Those were the days.

My older sister and her husband have hiked the Pacific Crest Trail (2650 miles) although it did take them two seasons as her husband suffered a knee problem. They are hardcore, I’m not.

I love the wilderness. You learn a few safety skills – don’t take short cuts unless you really know how to navigate by topo map, recognize the signs of hypothermia, basic first aid, treat your water – and you’re good. By far the most dangerous thing you will encounter is human men looking for victims. But the nasty ones, along with 99.9% of the others, will virtually never get out past two days’ hike from a car road.

I find everything about cities and suburbs disturbing: artificial, ugly, unhealthy, abrasive, frightening, loud, brutal, deathly, and terribly terribly sad. I still have to go into them, but I always have to steel myself, and to recover afterward.

And there’s your other side.

37

In the summer of 1991 I went on a week-long backpack/canoe trip at the Boundary Waters. It’s located along the Canadian-Minnesota border. Was with three other people.

Scenery was certainly nice. But I was miserable. Portaging a canoe for a mile isn’t fun. No showers. Didn’t catch any fish, so had to rely on whatever was in the backpacks. But the worst part was the mosquitos. They were thick. So thick that I wore a head net the entire time. I couldn’t wait for the trip to end.

38

I have never been snarled at by either a rabbit or a spider. Have met a number of nasty snarling humans, though.

Why not move to the city? I see little sense in continuing to live in a place you’re afraid of and disgusted by; and it reads to me that you’re committing serious light pollution where you are.

That happens to me inside my bedroom. (And when I manage to swat that one, it turns out that there’s one more that got in there somehow.)

Not the ones who deliberately moved out where they couldn’t see the next human’s lights at night.

And not the ones to whom that wasn’t/isn’t “wilderness”, but “home”.

– I will admit that sleeping on the ground has less appeal now than when I was younger; and except for an occasional brief mid-day nap I generally don’t. But I’d still rather sleep on the ground than live in a city.

39

Pretty sure I know that.

Kudzu is invasive and does much damage.

Don’t stand to close it might get you.

And some folks are sensitive to it. It causes rashes.

I mentioned foliage because the OP did.

40

You get the idea. :smiling_face: