How To Start a Camp Fire Even When it's Wet

Learn How to Backpack

Get the information and learn the skills you need to start backpacking! Complete SHOW NOTES HERE. Also be sure to check out the episode on how to choose and fit a backpack HERE.

NOTE:Below is a machine transcription. I am traveling off grid when this podcast episode is released and I didn’t have time to do the webpage before I left. If you email me, I can write you back when this page is up. Otherwise, please check back. Thanks for your patience and understanding! Kit

00:04 Welcome to the venture travel show podcast. I’m your host Keith Parks. About 10 years ago, I was wandering the stacks in my local library, one of my favorite restful things to do, and I’m one of the end caps. There’s a book on the history of the Appalachian trail. Now mind you, this is before the release of the movies, a walk in the woods and wild and I’d heard of the Appalachian trail, but I didn’t really know a whole lot about it. So I checked out the book and brought it home to read and I discovered that the Appalachian trail runs right through my home state in North Carolina. And not only that, that some of the people actually hiked the entire 2000 plus miles all at one time. I couldn’t believe it. I was fascinated by this and I decided that while I didn’t want to spend several months in my life walking the trail at one time, that I would like to do what they call section hiking, the Appalachian trail.

00:53 And so over the last oh 10 years or so, I’ve been doing little chunks as I have time. But I figured if I want to learn how to backpack first, I’m going to have to learn how to hike. This is before I did any of these outdoors with vendors at all. But this is what actually got me into this whole path of adventure travel. So happily with the help of the Internet, I googled hiking clubs and that’s when I discovered meetup. Another key find that also opened tremendous doors for me because I was relatively new to the triangle area and really hadn’t met anybody. So that not only helped me meet hiking friends, I met friends that have become lifelong friends. Just do that one clicking, try to find a hiking club. So that was a, a really key thing that actually really changed my life. So on the meetups, I found a group called [inaudible], which stands for triangle hiking and outdoor club. So I signed up for t hawk and at my first event, which was a multi mile hike in Umstead state park in Raleigh, I told the leader, Casey, what I wanted to do, that I wanted to do a little section Hank of the Appalachian trail. And gratefully he didn’t laugh at me and he was very encouraging and in many ways took me under his wing

01:59 Yet another t hog leader, Sherry was running a backpack conditioning series of hikes. So I signed up for that as well. We were instructed to bring our backpack and at this time I still had no idea what a backpack even was. I’d knew nothing, absolutely nothing like totally 100% clueless. And the only thing I could rustle up was I borrowed a book bag from somebody and I showed up with some books in this bag. I am sure that Sherry was inwardly rolling her eyes, but she was very sweet but she had to be wondering what on earth is this little princess doing here?

02:32 Okay.

02:32 And happily enough, I have to report later. Cher and I are also very good friends cause gratefully once Sherry found out that have a serious that I just was ignorant. She was very, very helpful and very encouraging of helping me figuring out this whole hiking and backpacking thing. And one really important thing that I’m really grateful for is the sound gear backpacking gear advice I got from the folks in this group. They saved me hundreds of dollars in potential bad purchases and this is something I’m really trying to help you with myself on this podcast is my way of paying it forward to all the helpful things that my t hog friends did for me b...