My Beginner Trail Lessons: Part 10

For a short background on this series, see my first post.  

S.T.O.P. slide from PowerPoint by Steve Lagreca

I have covered lots of lessons learned over the course of this blog series. There are likely many more small lessons I didn’t include. To close up this series, I want to cover what is probably the biggest lesson I have learned over the course of all my backpacking trips. This is to stay calm, think, and don’t rush when things don’t quite seem right or don’t go to plan. The S.T.O.P. acronym above is a great thing to keep in mind.

On our first trip, this may have resulted in me actually knowing we were still headed in the right direction, instead of just having a hunch/hoping we were. When I couldn’t find the trail in the Tetons, this could have resulted in me finding the trail again instead of taking the more dangerous route. When we were pumping water on the Highland Park trip and it got hard to pump, this may have saved us from having to cut the trip short due to a broken filter.

I could go on and on with this. There is a moment on nearly all of my backpacking trips where this would have likely saved or did save me some trouble. This S.T.O.P. acronym is often aimed towards people who are lost, but it comes in handy in many other situations as well. Rushed/hurried decisions, or those made while panicking, often aren’t the best decisions, and while you are backpacking, there can be severe consequences for bad decisions.

So when something goes awry in your next backpacking trip, S.T.O.P. Take a breath, relax, think, and take as much time as you can to make the best decision possible.

One more thing I want to touch on: you don’t need the best gear to do backpacking. My brother and I started off with a lot of cheap equipment on our first trips, and we were able to do the trips. Over the years, I have upgraded nearly all of my equipment to better equipment. It definitely helps in the comfort department, but it’s definitely not necessary. So don’t think to start out that you need to spend a boatload of money. You can definitely start off cheap like my brother and I did and work your way up to better equipment over time.