Wait until he is old enough to try wildwater rafting at the Nantala River Outdoor Center on the AT...

I wish you all the best on this great adventure! Maybe there is a through-hiker in the making.

It is a long walk, and he did the whole thing himself this time! We took a few breaks at the more scenic spots and he did complain a big and ask me to carry him a couple times but ultimately decided to keep walking each time and even started leading the way following the trail markers half way through.

We haven't decided anything really, we're very far out from doing it but we'll probably start in one of our favorite places, Shenandoah VA, and head south from there for as long as we feel comfortable, assuming a couple weeks.

We're planning a small through hike of a section of our local state forest in the spring, 3 nights at different campsites and about 24 miles of hiking in total, ending where we just camped which he called his favorite place in the whole world and asked if we could live there.

I think it's our responsibility as parents who enjoy the outdoors to pass this type of stuff on and make sure it's a positive an experience as possible (sorry to hear about that incident on your second trip!). We need future generations to not only care about the environment in a vague sense but to have a personal connection to it.

I took my son for the first time when he was four. The next year, we went three times, in spring, summer, and fall. We didn't get an opportunity to go away the year after that but our property is nice and wooded so we camped in the backyard a couple of times. These last two years, he's been more involved with sports and other activities so we've taken a break from overnight or multi-night trips and just done hikes. Next year, I have two weekend trips planned for spring and summer. I'm planning on taking my now eight year old son on one and my four year old daughter on the other. If only I could get the missus interested and we could all go at once.

There are dozens of us!

Next, make him into a hammock nerd

I can't quite remember my first camping trip, but still have the lil swiss army knife I was given when I was 6 and "camp" pretty much full-time nowadays. Good for you op, have fun :)

He got school at 4? Let little homie breath :)p

I will say you can still do some easy BWCA trips with an outfitter guide or there's places in Ely that let you just day trip. Don't let your BWCA dreams die

Camping for me as a kid was up in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. Paddle a few hours and you are away from most signs of civilization. No planes overhead, no cell towers, no electric motors.

I would love to do that now again at my age, but that kind of camping takes skills I never developed.

Keep at it and hopefully you'll have a lifetime of adventure with your kids!

Always wanted to do the AT. I hope your kid recovers from the trauma, camping was one of my favorite things about childhood!

That's a long walk for a 4 years old...

Will you go south to north or the other direction for the AT?

Have you decided on trail names yet?

Really happy you put in the effort to fly the hammocker's flag there! Best regards, another hammocker

Staying warm is easy, again it comes down to the right gear.

Try to put a sleeping bag inside a hammock and sleep on a cool night, you'll get hypothermia. Know a guy who came real close to that.

The problem is that the insulation in a sleeping bag is significantly less effective when the air is compressed out of it by the weight of your body pressing it against the hammock. Couple that with the fact that any gentle breeze keeps blowing any escaped heat away from under you and replacing it with fresh cool air, and you start to become what I like to call.. "actively refrigerated" from underneath. It's very unpleasant.

The solution is what's called an underquilt. It's literally just half a sleeping bag, in the shape of a hammock, with shock cords to hold it snuggly up underneath your hammock. It can't hold any weight, it's just there to be an uncompressed layer of insulation underneath you. And it works great!

After that, you don't need a sleeping bag inside the hammock, in fact it's unwieldy to get in and out of, and serves no purpose. So you use what's called a top quilt, which is basically just a fancy blanket with an enclosed space for your feet. You can just use a blanket, I have before.

The changing thing, yeah.. my SO had the same reservations. If you're car camping, you can just bring a little pop up changing room tent thing, goes up and down super easy. It's like a coiled up spring, very cool.

But if you're in the deep woods by yourself? No need, just change wherever.

If you're in the deep woods with a group? I always make sure my hammock is on the outside edge of the group, and I change behind it, using the hammock and it's rain fly as a block towards where the people are. Deep woods, so nobody behind you.

If I found myself in the middle of camp and needed to change, I could just undo the anchors for the rain fly and let it hang straight down around the hammock, then just sneak in between the flaps, and change. Yeah people can see your feet, maybe your ankles, but all other sides are blocked. It's just a bit uncomfortable, but it's not like you're spending all day like that.

But honestly I'm usually in a group of cis, straight, same gendered people. So unless I'm changing my underwear, I don't bother trying to hide at all, nobody's looking, nobody cares 🤷‍♂️

Hopefully that helps!

I do think I'd like to try this some day, only fears I have about it are staying warm and getting changed with some privacy

This was on TVA land at a designated free camp site relatively near me but it was still ~40 miles one way to get out there. If you have any sort of dams near you it is common for them to own the shores of all of the rivers and resiviors and they tend to be pretty permissive with land use especially in the more rural places.

I didn't think there was anywhere I could bike to and camp near me before I widened the search to include lands that were managed by state-owned enterprises in addition to state parks and national forrests. Sites like freecampsites.net/ are useful but far from exhaustive, and in southern states lean a lot more RV focused in my experience...

I hope you can find something! It is very therapeutic to be outside on a bike, and doubly so when you get to wake up early and watch the world wake up around you

One of us. One of us.

Absolutely changed my life, yes. I can't upvote this enough.

Do you free camp or is this at a camp ground? My problem is there nowhere I can bike to and camp near me.

This is why I love hammock camping. Only one damp thing, the rain fly that isn't even attached to anything else. And no dirt or bugs. It's great.

People ask: how can you sleep like a banana?

The answer is, you don't go banana. You lay flat. Heck I even sleep on my side. The trick is getting the right hammock (mostly length and width), hanging it correctly (90% of hammocks I see have absolutely the wrong angle, easy fix), and laying in it correctly (feet to one side, head to the opposite side).

It's my favorite way to camp.

That's a good idea to bring a small towel or something! I used my shirt that I wore on the way out to wipe off a good chunk of the drew from my bike and bags but it definitely wasn't absorbant enough to do the whole tent in any reasonable amount of time.

Nice!

I bring a special cloth (made to dry off dogs) to wipe down the tent before packing it up. It's super absorbent and I even cut it in two so I can keep one half with my camping gear and the other around the house. I can wipe the whole tent with just wringing it out a few times after full on rain, just for dew you it may even be sufficient with only a super absorbent (scandinavian) dish cloth. Unintuitively you ought to wet and wring those out first to make them more absorbent, that's not necessary with my dog cloth.

Thanks, I really appreciate the info! I think I messed up by not using the rain fly even though it was nice out for the sake of condensation. Even the corners of my sleeping bag were wet where it didn't have my body heat.

Yeah I feel like this "35f/2c" bag is about the limit of what I can use when it's 45f out without needing to wear all of my clothes to bed. Also this was my favorite picture from the trip:

It was really relaxing to watch the sunrise and watch the water skimmers skirt across the still water

Beautiful shot! My first trip last year taught me to always bring foot warmers/Toasty Toes and get a warmer sleeping bag.

Fun!! As to your dew question, it really depends on how humid your location is how quickly things will dry out. For backpacking or bike camping, if I'm moving camp, I usually try to clear everything out of the tent as soon as I get up. Take the fly off and hang it on a bush something, in the sun if possible; air out the bottom of the tent as well as you can...all while you're having breakfast etc. Or dawdle about to give everything time to dry out. Otherwise, yeah, it'll stay a little damp. Tents tend to dry quick though, so unless it stays rainy, usually even if you pack it up damp, it'll air out when you set camp the next evening.