thanks for the tip, I’ll check it out
About 15 years ago a friend turned me on to hammock camping. With rare speecialized exceptions (eg. in the treeless Yukon) I have not slept on the ground since. A pad is necessary to insulate your bottom from chilly night air, but a thin thermarest is usually sufficient in summer climes. I am a side sleeper, but a well designed offset camping hammock makes for a better night’s sleep than I ever have had when on the hard ground, no matter what pad I have used. In addiion, there is no need to be fussy about what is beneath you on the ground great for primitive camping in rough areas outside of designated beat down campsites (it is legal to do in most places I go).
Looks like the perfect place for a hammock camp. I see a couple but they just look like lounge hammocks other than a possible under a loosely pitched tarp.
I gave up sleeping on the ground and dealing w/ trying to find the best pad years ago. Now I just float above the ground in a down cocoon.
W/ your cargo capacity you could carry the glampiest of hammock setups and it might still be smaller than your tent and sleeping gear.
Looks like someone else had that same thought and beat me to it.
I have solutions for most treeless situations as well being that I spend loads of time in the desert.
And I do prefer an underquilt to a pad for bottom insulation.
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Since 1960. In the West, your next campsite is where you find it. Often where no one has camped before.
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We do have some hammock campers in the group - they swear by them. I haven’t taken the plunge - guess i like being cocooned up in my tent. I think about a bad storm with high wind and rain, or cold temperatures, or bugs? Nice to wake up on a cold morning in a relatively warm tent. Maybe someday I’ll give it a try. By the time you get the tarp and and the bug net and the pad and the quilts I’m not sure you are carrying less gear, but you are not sleeping on the ground, so there is that.
I’d love to get out west sometime, or up to Canada. we’ll see. For now my tripping is a little more structured.
your group buddies can give you details, but your hammock should come complete with an integrated bug net enclosure, some with an integrated overhead tarp. Mine does, but if I expect heavy rain I also bring an extra large separate tarp meant for the purpose. I keep my gear protected under me on the ground, or hanging on a nearby tree (of course all food items and “smellables” are either hanging in a bear bag or secjured in a bear resistant canister). I’ve been in some nasty storms and not had any problem in my hammock under the tarp. True that even in the summer a thin insulating pad is necessary to protect your bottom side from the night chill air, but the whole system with hammock, tarp and insulation is much lilghter (and far more comfortable) thn any solo tent I have ever had. When the season gets colder, most hangers use an underquilt. But i have not been convinced that the extra weight and bother is worth the trouble.
Other than the wonderful comfort factor, the best advantage for me is that I do not need to find a clear spot on the ground to set up for my nights rest. I have hung my hammock over wet swampy ground, over rocky ground, on step slopes, and over thick undergrowth and even in areas of blow ndown trees, all places where one could never set up any tent.All I eed is two trees at least 3in in diameter spaced 12-18 feet apart. Never a problem where I travel in the Adirondacks. In the Yukon I do travel with a tent, however, since the biggest tree might be only a thin whispy willow.
Uh you might rethink kayak before going on the NFCT. You will have to portage it depending on what bit you are doing… Some of the portages are cart friendly and some not. You really have to think backpacker.
Especially if you are doing the 2 mile long Mud Pond Carry. Its so deep and narrow and full of mud carts do not work.
Better ultralight canoe unless you are just doing the West Branch of the Penobscot or Flagstaff Lake or the larger lakes.
Bud, be sure to keep abreast of the current PA firewood restrictions as they evolve. Due to concerns about insect infestations they have been banning bringing in of firewood from out of state but now that we have infestations here already they are likely to clamp down even more on anyone moving it from site to site.
Sorry to be a buzzkill, but honestly, during over 50 years of backcountry camping, backpacking and canoe/kayak camping, I can count on one hand the number of times I or my companions bothered with a campfire and those were out of dire necessity (like somebody becoming soaked and hypothermic or a catastrophic campstove failure), not for routine cooking or entertainment. Backpacking stoves and lanterns always gave us all the low impact cooking and light sources we needed with far less effort and risk.
Yes, a bonfire can be lovely but it is also a lot of work to establish and maintain (even for me, a skilled fire starter, thanks to my early Girl Scout indoctrination and my outdoorsman father’s mentorship.) And they can be the source of multiple misfortunes, like sparks burning holes (or worse) in nylon tents and gear, people getting nasty burns, depletion of natural deadfall in the camping zone, scarring of the site with fire rings, etc. Also the origination point of many forest and brush fires especially during dry periods, like we are having now in SW PA.
Just saying, live fire does not need to be a routine part of a camping trip and it is possible to enjoy a stay in the wilds without it. I believe some traditions are best reevaluated. We’ve mostly moved past the axe, hobnailed leather boots, the wool blanket bedroll, stinky canvas tents, chopping branches to make bough beds and other vintage “woodsman” paraphernalia and practices. i love a nice driftwood bonfire on a sandy open beach but have learned to live without them in the woods.
By the way, on a more positive note, there are free camping areas along the West Branch of the Susquehanna, Bud, if you paddle that river. Unfortunately I don’t know where one can still get the excellent Lumber Heritage published set of plasticized route maps of the West Branch Water Trail which I think has note of some of them. My ex boyfriend has a great camp site on his property about 1.5 miles downstream from the low head dam at the Shawville power plant (which may already be decommissioned – have not heard whether that took place yet, be nice if they could remove that dam, though the portage is not that bad.) His camping area is between the river and a cleared pasture he doesn’t use but which has a pump with great spring water. There are a couple of cleared areas with large fire rings at which he often leaves stacks of wood for campers. There are a few church groups that sometimes bring bunches of canoe campers there but usually it is up for grabs and quite private (can’t see it from his house which is on the other side of surrounding woods. ) He’s pretty welcoming as long as campers are considerate (not leaving a mess or firing weapons randomly).
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I agree and one of the reasons I asked @eckilson if they packed in the firewood as it looked like some nice hardwood and all split up. I have been seeing postings about transporting firewood like the ones about not running your boat from body to body of water without cleaning the hull a similar cross contamination problem.
We have back yard campfires all summer maybe one per week and I have a couple cord stacked and it is still a little work keeping a small fire going from dusk till say midnight. You can burn thru quite a bit. I see they had a nice evening fire and then another to cook breakfast so they had to have a fair amount ether waiting on site or boated in.
All the camper sites around here have roadside firewood bundle sales each side of the campground for a few miles. A small armful bundle tied with twine and you put 10 bucks in the lock box. The campgrounds has no idea if you brought it with you from home or bought it down the road. My guess is a $10 bundle would make a nice fire for the kids that would last about an hour time enough for some hotdogs and some marshmallows as it was going out. I think in the case of parents with kids the camp fire experience is something they may have remembered as kids and want to have their kids enjoy. I know our two young boy nephews 5-6 really enjoy the back yard fire ring and the special treat is Uncle Bud has them carry the chunks of wood from the stack down to the fire. Each piece being a good 1/3 their body weight lets them show off how strong they are and the bonus is it saves Uncle Bud’s back.
Most of the rivers around here run thru enough towns it wouldn’t be too hard to pick a spot and stay in a motel. For me that’s close enough to roughing it. haha.
Your BF place sounds really nice and it is great he offers it. In today’s world my insurance man once told me after I made a backstop and a baseball diamond in my back field for my son and his pals to play sandlot baseball like I did as a kid. If I didn’t take it out my rates would go way up. He called it an attractive nuisance.
I made my initial comment about European Canoe camping and how they seem to go all out. This post gave me a bit of that feeling. Maybe because it is in New England.
As always, pack for the trip you are doing. Do you remember Riverstrider? He has a great trip report of his portage on the Mud Pond Carry.
I wouldn’t bring the kitchen sink on that trip.
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With my crew there is a fire every morning and night, unless there are restrictions. It is a lot of work, but our ritual is the same:
- Pull into camp
- Claim your tent spot by dropping your bags
- Get out of water shoes into land shoes
- Forage and cut up firewood (do it first before you get tired)
- Put up tent and change into clean, dry cloths for the night
- Cocktails
- Dinner
- Evening fire (leave enough wood for the next morning)
- Bed, but not before 10:00
It takes a fair amount of wood - here is a typical pile
Stoves are fine, but I am also getting better at cooking on the fire.
To each their own, it wouldn’t be the same without a fire.
There are restrictions in RI as well. We did bring in wood, but it was local, as are we. 
Usually we gather wood on site.
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A word or two about fires. I like em. As a forester, they are a traditional part of camping. Wood is carbon neutral. Fires when legal, help clean up some of the dead fuel lying around. Building big fires is a waste of time and energy. I don’t even bring an axe of saw any longer. Just put the long pieces in and push.
Some people are proud of their stoves and the fact that they never build fires. Well, stoves are made with materials that need to be mined and from fossil fuels. They need fossil fuels to burn. It takes transportation to move the materials around and there is the problem of how to deal with left over containers.
I like fires as long as they are legal. But there is no need to bring a chainsaw to create the fuel supply.
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It took us a long time to cut up these big logs with this little saw.
Just kidding, the big logs were cut up by the rangers during a site clean-up, but the pile of wood in the back was cut with hand saws - a folding bow saw works well too.
We shouldn’t transport firewood. Restrictions are everywhere now that we’re paying attention to the spread of tree killing insects. The Vermont campground we’re visiting in a couple weeks had over 2000 ash trees removed after the emerald ash borer took up residence.
For remote camping, I have a Sven saw and expect to forage and cut wood for an hour if the family wants an evening campfire - which they usually do unless it’s hot weather.
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Your post got me thinking about carbon neutrality a bit.
I know harvesting fuel wood from a managed forest at a rate that’s sustainable indefinitely is a carbon neutral practice.
I also know that when I go scouting around a site for fallen limbs to cut up for a fire, I’m taking sequestered carbon that would have been recycled slowly over time through consumption and decomposition, and instead I’m releasing it back into the atmosphere all at once.
So even if the practice is carbon neutral over the long term, my campfires increase atmospheric CO2 in the short term. I know it’s a guilty pleasure, but it’s only a few times a year and pretty far down on my list of environmental sins.
I’m still not convinced the world is at an overly high point in atmosphere CO2 right now. I have listened to some pretty convincing arguments that if anything we are at a carbon low point now when looking back over the millenniums and when the earth was even greater covered in vegetation.
Ether way a 100 years of campfires for anyone that wants and enjoys one wont come close to what Canada wildfires put into the air in one week. The media take was not that these fires were causing climate change rather climate change caused the fires. I didn’t really see much coverage on what caused the fires actually. Forest management is IMO the likely cause.
The way I look at it in regards to wood rotting on the forest floor or being gathered up and burned are both in the end oxidation processes and release the same gasses. In the case of a camp fire and the big picture of the world’s lifespan one hour burn or one year rot are both such short periods of time they can be viewed as the same.
This is just my opinion and I can find information on both sides of the debate that is convincing.
I saw a report the other night of a climate scientist that has been on the road checking on where temp. readings are being taken. He has been to 1000s of locations and documented how ether the location at one time was isolated in nature and mankind has encroached or where the reading point had to be moved and the new location wasn’t as rural. He documented it all with photos and showed one in the middle of a blacktop parking lot and others attached to brick buildings. He was making the claim there is an effort to push reading in the direction of warming. Who knows.
If you want a campfire and can do it safely go for it.
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