It occurred to me this week that although I travel and camp and hike and generally adventure solo, I don’t talk about it much, not about the actually solo aspect of it. It occurred to me because Cat Higgy was asking for advice on Twitter, about the South West Coast Path and about hiking and camping alone. Eventually it occurred to me that it was time to write a post about it and while I’m on holiday, on my own, with nothing more pressing to do than watch the sunset from my private tub, it was the perfect moment to write the solo post.
And then I wrote a load of gibberish and came home to write it for real.
Also, I accidentally scheduled this post for release on the wrong day, before it was finished so sorry if you’ve already seen it. This is the complete and improved version.
I was trying to think when I first camped solo and I think it was my Icelandic bus trip around the Highlands in 2013. That seems a bit of a baptism of fire but I honestly don’t think it even occurred to me that it was an event. I’d owned my own tent since somewhere between 1999 and 2001, can’t remember exactly which mid-teen birthday I had it for. My caving club went to an annual caving party while I was a student and there was never enough room for the entire student caving community to sleep in the hut so we took tents and I pitched mine by myself and I slept in it by myself but I was also surrounded by my club and other clubs. Then I took it to Guide camps and Ranger camps. I wasn’t a leader with the Guide unit and I preferred to take my own tent rather than go in the big leader tent and when we did Ranger camps, obviously leaders don’t share with girls, so I slept in my little blue tent there as well. So I guess by the time I went camping truly on my own for the first time, I was so accustomed to all the stuff that goes along with camping by myself that it didn’t occur to me that perhaps I was doing something a bit new and a bit scary, because it felt neither new nor scary. The only thing that bothered me was getting my gear down to a size I could take on a plane and then carry from a bus to a campsite. Bless Iceland for always putting the bus stops on the edge of the campsites! I was far more occupied with “hotels are expensive in August and there’s no handy hotel for Skaftafell so I guess camping would get round those problems?” than “I’ve never camped on my own this is the scariest thing what was I thinking!”.
When did I first hike solo? Umm… I remember doing a fairly long walk from Lulworth to White Nothe and back on William and Kate’s wedding day. So that would have been 2011. It’s the first walk in my logbook too. I don’t remember it being the first time I hiked on the cliffs but I do remember it being the first time I ever saw Durdle Door in real life, because I was astonished how much it looks like the photos in geography textbooks and it was definitely the first time I ventured quite so far. 10+km across some pretty steep cliffs is a bit of a hike for your first ever! I did my Bronze Duke of Edinburgh expeditions in school (blogged about them too: practice | real thing) so I suppose I wasn’t totally new to maps and compasses and long walks and I’d spent my student years hiking across fields, moors and mountains to caves, although with no maps and no idea where I was going other than “follow the boys”. But if this was my first ever solo hike, I wonder what inspired me to pick one quite that long and awkward. Maybe there were earlier ones, smaller, easier ones that just haven’t stuck in my mind like that one.
So for me, how to camp and hike solo was “just jump right on in there with something that’s a bit bigger and scarier than it should be without even noticing that it’s a bit big and scary”. Is that advice I’d give to a first-timer? No! Oh, goodness me, no!
And yet… I guess I did those things solo without thinking about it because I was accustomed to doing it with other people. So that’s my first advice. Get comfortable doing the thing first. Camp with friends and family. Get used to putting your tent up on your own. Get used to putting it up in the dark and the rain. I vividly remember one of those caving trips – we’d arrived late, we were pitching camp about midnight, it was Wales, it was pouring with rain and Andy came past, paused to watch me wrestling with my tent, observed “You should get someone to help you with that” and walked on. I guess I’ve figured ever since that getting my tent up all by myself in adverse conditions is no problem for me. Try to get it to being no problem for you and then when you really are by yourself, at least you know that shelter is one thing you don’t have to worry about. Same goes for hiking. Walk lots with other people. Take a leadership role, in that you’re in charge of the route and the navigating. Work your way up to that if you need to. Get the person in your group who knows about it to show you what they’re doing. The more skills you have, and the more confident you are in those skills, the less you have to worry about when you’re on your own.
Go to training courses! Official training is wonderful. I did two navigation weekends in 2014 and my regional casual walking weekends still involve the same ladies who trained me and so each weekend is an unofficial refresher. You think you’re out for a nice walk and then one of your companions, who’s in her 70s and has been a Mountain Leader for 50+ of those years, stops and insists that everyone checks exactly where they are and exactly where they’re going – by which I mean that you need three bits of evidence for being where you are and you mustn’t use either the words “I think” or “are we?” or any questions or even questioning tones of voice at all. Oh, and no electronics. I haven’t got the faintest idea what to do with my GPS but I’m a star with a paper map and compass. Not that I’m qualified to teach but if you’re really unsure and can get yourself to Dartmoor, I’ll come and teach you the basics of navigation myself. Bring a 1:25 000 OS map (OL28 is the Dartmoor one) and a half-decent compass. I mean it.
If you don’t have a group you can practice with, maybe the best thing to do is start small. Don’t set off on a multi-day hike across the Scottish Highlands. Do a couple of hours on a local signposted trail. Do a half day trip on a less-signposted trail. Work your way up to longer hikes until you’re comfortable enough to try for whatever solo epic you want to do. Camp in your garden. Camp in a friend’s garden. Camp for one night at a campsite near home. Camp for a weekend somewhere further but where you can still get home easily if you need to. Once you’re comfortable with hiking and camping, you can go big. Things will go wrong but if you’ve practiced, if you’re used to it, those problems will be things to solve rather than world-ending catastrophes.
You’ll also learn when to call it a day. This is an undervalued skill. Know when pressing on is dangerous. Know when giving up and trying again another day is the best course of action. Don’t put yourself in the position where you find you need rescuing if it could have been avoided by recognising that it was time to cancel. Know when the weather is too appalling to keep hiking into the mountains. Know when you’re too tired to continue. Know when sleeping in a leaky tent is unpleasant and when it’s risking serious hypothermia. That’s when you’re really putting your skills and experience into practice. There’s always another time and if you’re inclined to be embarrassed that you “gave up” or “quit”, you know that you did it for a good reason and you did it because you know what you’re doing, even if the people you’re sheepishly explaining it to don’t. You’re the expert here. I “gave up” on day two of the Laugavegur Trail back in 2018. I’d nearly got hypothermia in the snow on day one, I struggle hugely to walk in snow, I’d only made it to the hut because I had a wonderful and patient guide who walked me literally one step at a time. On day two, I went in the support car because the first half of the day was over more deep snow – although in better weather. Perhaps with the right food in me and without my insulating layers scattered over my companions’ bags, I might have managed day two. But our guide and I made a sensible and safe mutual decision that it would be best for me and for the group if I went in the car. Sure, I missed a quarter of the hike but I also had a very entertaining day forcing a large 4×4 through snowdrifts, rivers and spectacular scenery and without ever getting wet or cold and I don’t regret it or feel embarrassed about it..
One other thing. Personally, I’m wary of wild camping. I don’t think I’d do it on my own. Maybe you would. Maybe you’re working your way up to it! Maybe I’d do it if I’d practiced it with friends enough times first. But one way of camping solo without feeling the isolation is to stick to campsites, real ones, the ones with colour-coded bins and sunburned families sitting under the awning of touring caravans on the other side of the field and showers that aren’t as hot as you were promised. They’re more expensive than wild camping, sure. But I find the price for a single small tent for a single person on a non-electric pitch works out around £10-20 a night, depending on the facilities on offer and how glamorous the owner thinks the site is, and that’s not bad for the facilities and the knowledge that there are other people nearby. I will never not recommend a real campsite. I think they’re fantastic. Icelandic ones even tend to have showers that really are hot because hot water is provided by the ground rather than the heating system. You’ll probably even get hot water for washing your pots in!
Your two difficulties with solo camping and hiking are the self-reliance and the isolation. Building your skills and experience takes away the problems with the self-reliance. Your second difficulty, and that’s not much you can actually do about it, is the isolation. I’m not talking about being lonely. I think if you’re making plans for a big solo adventure, being lonely isn’t at the top of your list of problems because you probably wouldn’t be making those plans at all if it was. For me, it’s the idea of someone coming along with a huge curved gleaming pirate sword and just slashing through my tent and me. It’s having no one to protect me from unexpected harm. I can tell myself over and over again that most of the people I’d be with if this was a group thing would be no good at protecting me either. For crying out loud, I went for a walk around the block with my mum earlier in the year. We came across a big noisy dog who took exception to us being within his field of vision. My mum hid behind me. My own mother used her firstborn child as a human shield. I’d feel safer if I was hiking or camping with her (hahaha my mum would never hike or camp!) but I wouldn’t be, not at all. Those big caving boys – of the four you can see in the first photo on this post, there’s only one I could imagine not running for the hills if someone attacked the group while we were hiking to a cave. That one was in the TA, you know. Went to Iraq, you know. He’s a terrier – he’d fight anyone and anything. Would he win? Well, that’s another question. The other three, no. They’d be no protection. They’d be gone. I might feel safer in a group but I’m having huge difficulty imagining a group in which I’d actually be safer. I feel perfectly comfortable out hiking with my Guides but if anything happens, I’m the adult, I’m the one who has to be the protector, these pre-teen girls are not going to save me. Safety in a group is kind of an illusion.
Let’s talk about the actual likelihood of unexpected harm. It’s not impossible. We’ve had a very stark reminder of that recently. But it’s rare. Nothing has ever happened to me, not here and not anywhere else. I had a moment in 2017 in Iceland when a man came across the campsite with a giant knife. And a bowl of other cooking stuff he’d just washed up. And I realised I also had a freshly-washed knife in my hand and although mine was far smaller, it was also far sharper. And we had a brief friendly conversation about the merits of our respective campervans, smiled and went our separate ways. On Dartmoor in 2018 I realised there was a man on a route that was going to intersect with mine and I realised I was alone and defenceless and we were in the middle of the Okehampton Ranges, which is relatively remote and quiet. Meet a strange man at Haytor and you’ll have hundreds of witnesses. Out here, not so much. He turned out to be a very friendly local hiker who wanted to tell me his entire life story as we climbed Yes Tor and then wasn’t having me skipping High Willhays when it’s right there a couple of hundred metres away. This was his local patch and he wanted me to appreciate it all and understand how much he appreciated it. I enjoyed his company.
And in all my years of hiking and camping and travelling solo, those are the only two stories I have where I was even concerned, even for a moment.
You can tell yourself that thousands of times but knowing something – that you’re safe enough even on your own – is very different to feeling something. Perhaps you can only feel it when you’ve done it a few times, when that lizard corner of your brain that does the feeling has really learnt the non-existence of danger while you’re out solo. Either that or you have to have the sort of brain that doesn’t really register that this might not be 100% safe. But then even going out for a walk around the block, as I have 300+ times in the last year, that’s not 100% safe. Staying at home in your own house with the door locked isn’t even 100% safe.
American readers might suggest carrying pepper spray or some other personal defence thing. In the UK, that’s illegal. If you’re feeling vulnerable in your tent, maybe keep the empty tent bag nearby with the mallet on top of it rather than in it? It’s not legal to whack an intruder with a rubber mallet but as you won’t have an intruder, it’ll make you feel safer. A baseball bat in the tent is definitely there with intention to harm, so don’t take a baseball bat, but a rubber mallet is standard camping equipment and it’ll do much the same job. If you’re hiking, take poles with you – it’s not legal to whack someone in the face with hiking poles even in self-defence but in reality, you won’t at any point actually need to but knowing you have the capability to do so will make you feel safer and I’d certainly give up quickly if someone did that to me.
So get rid of the difficulties with self-reliance by levelling up your skills and get rid of the difficulties with isolation by telling your brain to shut up, basically, and having a useful tool that could be turned illegally into a weapon if it really needed to. Your brain will soon learn that it doesn’t need to be in panic mode 24/7 and you’ll soon learn that you don’t actually need to be prepared to whack someone with your mallet or poles.
Good luck! Don’t forget, after all that, to have fun! Take lots of photos! And be proud of your achievement. Even a small achievement is an achievement. Be proud of that first garden camp, be proud of that first short trail walk. Be proud of your six-month hike across half the planet, be proud of wild-camping your way around the world.