50 essential (Wilderness) backpacking tips

When you’re out in the wilderness that many of us love to be in there are a few things that are best not forgotten, here we have 50 great tips that will help you have a fantastic time on your adventures.

In the United States, Canada, the Republic of Ireland, and United Kingdom, hiking means walking outdoors on a trail, or off trail, for recreational purposes. A day hike refers to a hike that can be completed in a single day. However, in the United Kingdom, the word walking is also used, as well as rambling, while walking in mountainous areas is called hillwalking.

In Northern England, Including the Lake District and Yorkshire Dales, fellwalking describes hill or mountain walks, as fell is the common word for both features there.

Hiking sometimes involves bushwhacking and is sometimes referred to as such. This specifically refers to difficult walking through dense forest, undergrowth, or bushes, where forward progress requires pushing vegetation aside. In extreme cases of bushwhacking, where the vegetation is so dense that human passage is impeded, a machete is used to clear a pathway.

The Australian term bushwalking refers to both on and off-trail hiking. Common terms for hiking used by New Zealanders are tramping (particularly for overnight and longer trips), walking or bushwalking.

Trekking is the preferred word used to describe multi-day hiking in the mountainous regions of India,Pakistan, Nepal, North America, South America, Iran and in the highlands of East Africa. Hiking a long-distance trail from end-to-end is also referred to as trekking and as thru-hiking in some places.  In North America, multi-day hikes, usually with camping, are referred to as backpacking

Use this as a reminder so that you don’t forget the essentials.  Being safe and prepared is better than wishing you were after it hits the fan.

An early example of an interest in hiking in the United States, is Abel Crawford and his son Ethan’s clearing of a trail to the summit of Mount Washington, New Hampshire in 1819.

This 8.5 mile path is the oldest continually used hiking trail in the United States. The influence of British and European Romanticism reached North America through the transcendentalist movement, and both Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) were important influences on the outdoors movement in North America. Thoreau’s writing on nature and on walking include the posthumously published “Walking” (1862)”.

While an earlier essay “A Walk to Wachusett” (1842) describes a four-day walking tour he took with a companion from Concord, Massachusetts to the summit of Mount Wachusett, Princeton, Massachusetts and back. In 1876 the Appalachian Mountain Club, America’s earliest recreation organization, was founded to protect the trails and mountains in the northeastern United States.