How to Build a Camp in the Woods – General Trekking Tips

If you are going for serial day treks planning to stay several days and nights doing daily explorations on a particular location in the wilds, making a permanent campsite is a MUST DO for you and Here’s Why and How to Build a Camp in the Woods…

1. You can spend more time on a trail and not worry about setting up and breaking down a new camp every day. So, make up your mind for making a permanent campsite.
2. You can take important gear with you and keep the rest in the camp tent if you are unable to carry it along all day.
3. When you just to want to spend some quality time in the wilderness rather covering miles.
4. When you are trekking with children or the first timers, you can return to your home base cam safely in case of bad weather or any injury.
5. When there’s a team of trekkers coming on the location in a day or two, you can setup before they arrive.
6. When you are trekking in unfamiliar areas, you can always come back to your home base camp when you think you lost your way.

These are all good reasons for making a permanent campsite

Here’s How to Build a Camp in the Woods

Base camp is a home away from your home. So, treat it the same way.

Start from the ground location

Before you begin, we suggest you start making notes from this blog on How to Build a Camp in the Woods so that you don’t have to remember each and everything. Just take out the notes and you are ready to go. Start with finding a surface that is mostly level. Clean it up as much as possible before starting the construction of your temporary home. Take out any sharp stones or bones from the ground if any. Space should be adequate enough where you can keep your belongings, can make a small kitchen.

Listen to the weather forecast before setting up the camp. If there’s storm coming in the night, camping in that area will be dangerous. Stay close to water but not too close in case of floods.

Look for dead tree limbs above, you don’t want those branches to fall on you. Also, if you can, choose a place from where you enjoy the morning view and the night sky. We all want our homes to have a good window view, don’t we?

Bring out Your Architectural Skills

Now, that you have decided the perfect place to build you base camp set up your sleeping tent, place for kitchen, cleaning, and storage. Hang a tarp high overhead your whole setup to block rain. Keep the trap slanted (triangular structure) so that water doesn’t stay on the trap for long.

Put your efforts

1. Sleeping Tents

Once decided what will be placed where, focus on each section separately. Let’s begin with sleeping tents. Make sure you do it before it gets dark soon. An ‘A’ shape tent is recommended. Make it rain proof and insulated.

2. Storage

While you are working your way to your base camp, you need your gear and other stuff safe, so next thing you do is build a storage area under the tarp. Keep the things that you need often or the most at the top and other stuff below it. Also, keep the firewood in the storage to avoid them getting wet in rain.

3. Kitchen/Fireplace

Build a fire pit in a cooking area. A solid, dry, flat rock surface is ideal for kitchen. Hang a clothesline under the tarp and right over the fireplace where you can dry up your wet clothes and other gear. Keep a storage area where you keep your backpacks and other gear.

4. Safety

Never underestimate the wild. Keep the knives, sharpened, wooden logs not too far so that when you need them you can easily grab them. If you cooking meat in the fireplace, don’t keep it in open for too long as the nearby animals can visit your base camp sniffing a tasty meat.

5. Cleaning

If you don’t clean the place once you leave, you don’t belong to the mountains. No plastic garbage, bottles, packets or leftovers. Keep you base camp and leave it clean. If you want to unload your stomach, dig a pit and cover it up with mud once you are done. That’s the right way.

You get the idea How to Build a Camp in the Woods now.

Happy Trekking!