5 Mistakes I Made on my First Backpacking Trip
Maggie Slepian
For someone who’s worked in the outdoor industry for the past seven years, my first backpacking trip wasn’t terribly long ago. I did not like the outdoors as a youth. I recently asked my parents for some outdoors photos of myself as a kid, and they wrote back two days later saying they’d been through every photo album in the house, but couldn’t find any pictures of me outside except for a few eating ice cream on the back porch. So needless to say, my first backpacking trip didn’t happen until adulthood. Once I got out there, I was hooked, but it definitely took awhile, and I wasn’t terribly skilled in the outdoors right off the bat.
In 2011 I was working as a horseback guide in Yellowstone Park, and took it upon myself to plan an overnight backpacking trip when my dad and brother came out to visit. It was a new experience for all of us, and we kind of bumbled along with my questionable leadership. I didn’t do anything particularly wrong or unsafe, but I also didn’t do a ton of research. Live and learn, right?
1) I totally underestimated what it was like to carry a full pack
Prior to my first backpacking trip, I’d only ever been day hiking. I had no idea what a difference carrying 30 pounds would be—more on my poor gear selection below—but carrying all of that weight meant our hiking pace was slower, which meant my mileage estimate was incorrect, which meant people…..got…..crabby. If you take someone who’s never carried more than 5-8 pounds and quadruple that weight, you’re going to have some major differences. I remember hiking up the first minor incline, feeling my legs shaking, my breath shallow, and while the car was still in sight, groaning as the pack straps dug into my shoulders.
2) I did the bare minimum amount of gear research
That’s not to say I headed into the woods with my childhood sleeping bag, cotton sweats, and a roller suitcase. I did buy a full backpacking setup, and I did wear trail running shoes, and technical layers. But I stopped short of delving into different options for a backpacking kit, and went with the first thing the salesperson at REI held up to my face. My pack weighed over 5 pounds empty, I carried a zero-degree sleeping bag in August, and I bought $10 backpacking meals instead of comparable $1 Pasta Sides. My two-person tent weighed 4.5 pounds and I had no concept of compression sacks, so I tied my sleeping bag to the bottom of my pack where it bounced against my legs with every step I took. In short, I looked (and felt) like a beginner backpacker, which I was. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and that gear setup works great for a lot of people. But I certainly could have saved myself a boatload of money if I’d just delved a little deeper into backpacking literature and understood the value of saving weight, and I wouldn’t have felt the need to buy an entirely new setup within the year.
3) I didn’t look up any terminology
My first backpacking trip was in Wyoming. Prior to living in Wyoming, I had spent my entire life on the East Coast. I knew that a notch and a gap were pretty much the same things, and if your trail dropped down to one of them, you were going to be spending a hell of a time hiking out of it. I knew about blowdowns and high-water crossings, and most of the terms associated with day hiking around the East Coast. One very important term that I didn’t know was what a “pass” was. In my experience, when someone said “pass,” it meant to go around something. Since I didn’t know how to read a topo map or have a GPS unit with elevation gain, I made the very wrong assumption that my hike was flat, since the trail description mentioned something about “Electric Pass.” I had day-hiked Electric Peak earlier that summer, and it was absolutely savage.
4) I didn’t practice anything
When we got to our campsite by Sportsman Lake in Yellowstone National Park, I looked at my Kelty Gunnison tent and realized I’d never set it up. I’d pulled the tags off the stuff sack, but the poles were still in their plastic wrapper and I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to put it together. I’d also never lit a camp stove, hung a bear bag, or really even packed my backpack. My food was buried at the bottom of my pack, the tent was strapped to the outside, and accessing my hydration bladder was like digging a Tetris piece from the bottom of a Tetris pile. Learning things by trial and error is a proven way to grow in skills and experience, but there’s something to be said for having some sort of idea of what you’re getting into before you head into the backcountry.
5) I didn’t necessarily have the skills to be out there
This is one kind of debatable, and probably ripe for online judgement, but it’s true. I knew to hang a bear bag and how to filter water, but I didn’t have a navigation system, backcountry first aid skills, and I wasn’t super familiar with that section of Yellowstone. I had been working in the park for the past two summers, so I knew how to deploy bear spray and where the nearest ranger station was. But I went out for an overnight point-to-point hike with just a trail description from a hiking book, and without any idea how to find the trail if I lost it, or packing any paper maps or navigation tools. Backups and redundancy are your best friends in the backcountry, and knowing how to use navigation tools if you get disoriented or unsure of which direction to head can quite literally save your life.
I don’t beat myself up over the silliness and ineptitude of my first trip though. The group had a great time, we learned as we went, and nothing went amiss. But there’s always the off chance that something could go wrong, and it’s always best to be prepared. Or, at least more prepared than I was.
