The Beginner's Guide to Camping: Whereas I'm the Beginner

When I first moved back to Washington in the fall of 2010, my wife and I decided we wanted to attempt to become involved in outdoors activities.

Growing up in Kirkland, I was never an active outdoorsman. I went camping every summer with my grandparents (on the Wallowa River in Oregon), but that was about the extent of my experience. My family didn’t hike or hunt or fish or ski or snowboard.

Mainly, we played sports, read books, were active in our church, traveled around the country and just hung out with family and friends.

My wife also grew up not being tremendously outdoorsy (is that a word? Probably not, but it is now). She grew up in Odessa, Texas. If you’ve ever been to Odessa, well, there isn’t any outdoors to speak of, except for oil rigs. There are some mountains about 2 hours away, but with blistering summer time temperatures, camping in West Texas is not very enjoyable.

When we moved to Richland, we wanted to enjoy the ample opportunities at our fingertips. Plus, we don’t know anyone, so we might as well go wander the wilderness.

We started out by attempting to get into hiking. I wrote about three of those experiences for the Herald last summer. We hit up Palouse Falls, Franklin Falls and the Twin Sisters. We also bought bikes and started riding them around the Tri-Cities.

We now feel like we are ready for the next outdoors step: camping.

We already own a tent, we think we can start a fire and, well, that’s about it.

We’ve been camping together twice — once at Davis Mountains State Park in Texas and once at Hells Gate State Park in Lewiston — but now we are ready to dive in on our own, not with family.

So, I figured I’d write about it — plus, maybe the paper will pay for some of this (hint, hint) — and let you (all six of you who read the blog) follow along.

I’ll be back in a week or so with a preliminary list of camping supplies I own, what I need to pick up and what I dream about getting. I also am going to come up with a list of places I’d like to camp this spring and summer and then start mapping everything out.

Hopefully you enjoy this. I think it could be fun. At the very least, you can mock me.