[wind blowing]
- Camping.
You disappear into the landscape.
[soft piano music]
And... it just feels really good.
At the end of a long day,
we look for a place to camp for the night.
I mean, something like this.
There's no designated campsites.
You go where you want.
Let's go this way a little bit, then.
We look for a site with good visibility in all directions.
We want to see wildlife approaching well in advance.
This kind of area isn't looking too bad, eh?
We come across an open gravel bar
with all the features of a good campsite.
- Do we have the map we can check?
- Okay.
- Oh, yeah, you can, like, see
it parallels the river.
- This looks like a pretty great campsite
because it's flat; it's nice hard gravel,
so we won't have to destroy any vegetation to camp here.
There's good water right nearby,
and there's great visibility.
- Yeah, there's a lot of good spots.
- We consider the layout of our camp before we set up.
Camping in this area, the water is back there
so we can cook back there too,
and then we can store bear cans back upstream.
Our site is well over a half mile away from the road
and out of view of the road.
Visible from the road. - Yeah.
- We don't see any signs of prior human use,
and the surface of the ground is hard and durable
so we shouldn't cause any lasting damage.
Most of whatever incidental impacts you're going to have
on the landscape are gonna happen in the location
where you camp.
It's like, wow, it really is up to me
to make sure that I'm doing the least impactful thing,
because nobody's telling me where to camp,
where to wash my dishes, where to put my food,
or anything.
We plan separate areas for the tents,
the cook site, and the bear cans,
all within site and at least 100 yards away from each other.
The 100-yard golden triangle:
you have your tent and then at least 100 yards away,
and if you count it out, that's really, really far.
You'd be surprised.
You cook and eat your food
and brush your teeth.
And then at least 100 yards away from both of those places
is where you store your bear can.
About 100 yards.
And then are we gonna cook further back that way?
- Yeah, or-- - Kind of do it in a line?
The whole goal is to avoid bears
associating people, tents, backpacks, bear cans
with food.
- Bears are really curious animals.
They're constantly in search of food.
- As soon as a bear gets some food from one tent,
it's gonna check out every tent it sees
for the rest of its life because it knows;
they're smart.
They're like, "Well, that happened once.
"It might happen again.
"So every tent I see, I'm gonna check it out
because it was delicious last time."
- Your actions can change the behavior of these animals
drastically, so it's so important to respect the fact
that you are just merely passing through.
- We're gonna cook dinner.
- It's dinnertime? - Whoo!
[indistinct chatter]
- We all head over to the cook site
to prepare dinner.
[laughter]
- Oh, yeah. - Further back.
- Yeah, to go into the waterfall.
- Our cook site has a clear line of sight
in all directions.
We have to be especially alert while cooking.
Bears have great noses and will be curious
about interesting smells.
- Sounded like a female voice.
- Yeah. Yeah, we should watch it.
- You know, it's like, "I'm safe; I'm at home.
I'm cooking. What could be better?"
But you're still out there;
you're still in the home of all these other wild animals.
We take out only the food that we'll need,
keeping Ziploc bags and the bear cans close by
so that if an animal approaches,
we can quickly seal the food in a plastic bag
and get it back into the container.
We eat our dinner at the cook site
well away from our tents.
[indistinct chatter]
After dinner we clean up the cook site.
As everyone knows, some really good cheese sauce.
If we do have extra scraps of food,
we put them into a waste bag that we lock in the bear can
and take with us when we leave.
- The one that's not filled with beans and rice.
- We move away from the stream to do our scrubbing.
We want to avoid attracting wildlife
and contaminating the streams.
We don't use soap since we really don't need it
and we disperse the gray water widely.
Quick flick.
I think some people do, like, a wide sprinkle,
but I like a quick flick.
- Like this.
- I just get some rocks in there.
- Knowing we have an early morning ahead of us,
we're ready to call it a night.
You definitely want to brush your teeth at your cook site,
'cause when you spit that stuff out,
that's extra smells.
And you want it to be at your cook site,
not around your tent.
The best method for spitting out your toothpaste
is to really aerate it.
Try to make it as much of a mist as possible.
The best toothbrush performance of my life.
[laughter]
We make sure all of our food and any scented items
are stored in the bear cans.
We place the bear cans at their designated location
at least 100 yards from the tents,
along with pots, pans, fuel, and the cook stove.
"Is my sunscreen in there?
My hand sanitizer, is that still in my pack?"
It's not with my food, but all that stuff has to be
collected up and put in the bear can.
Before I go to bed, there's one last thing to take care of.
In the backcountry, proper disposal of human waste
is very important.
- I look for good organic soil.
- Make sure you are at least 100 feet away
from a water source.
- And so I always take the top off
and preserve it.
- Dig a hole 6 go 8 inches deep.
- And you want to dig it into organic soil
so it biodegrades.
- When finished, replace the cover soil and vegetation
to leave no trace for future hikers or inquisitive animals.
- Like it never even happened.
- Pack out all toilet paper
and feminine hygiene products.
- There was one trip where I actually spent 48 hours
wishing in my head, "Please stop raining.
"Please just stop raining.
Please just stop raining."
And it didn't.
- We have a lot of ground to cover today,
and we want to get an early start.
- Started raining at, like, 4:30, 5:00 yesterday.
- Shaking of the last bits of sleep,
we start packing up.
In the morning it's like, "Okay.
We're doing this."
You will be dry again someday.
You will be warm again.
When cleaning up camp, we challenge ourselves
to leave as little trace of our campsite as possible.
We pack out all our garbage
and make sure not a single sign of our stay
is left behind.
Ghosting away; it's like you were never there.
It's like you just kind of kissed the land that night
and then you're on your way.
We set off for a new adventure and a new day.
[indistinct chatter]
Seven years ago when I first started camping
was like, "Oh, man," like, "I'm so tiny.
This is so big,"
and now you still feel small, of course,
but now it's more like, "Oh, I'm being swallowed up,"
and then it's like I'm disappearing into this,
and that is so good.
[birds chirping]