From Almanacs to Satellites: How Campers Have Predicted the Weather from the 1860s to Today

 

 

 

"...a dull, heavy sound came up from the depths of the forest,—a solemn, ominous sound, breaking the dead silence. Another and another followed; a muffled roar, filling the air, so that one might not tell from what quarter it came.

"Yes," said John, as the noise died away,—"yes, it will rain. The old trees never lie. Those sounds you have just heard are made by falling trees. You always hear them before a storm."

"But, John," I exclaimed, "what makes them fall this morning? There is not a breath of air stirring."

"I don't know," responded John, "what makes them fall. I have often thought how queer it is.

Many a time have I sat in my canoe on a morning like this, when there was not wind enough to float a feather, and seen the old fellows come crashing down. I tell you what," continued he, "it makes a man feel solemn, to see tree after tree, great, giant chaps, a hundred and fifty feet high, begin all of a sudden to quiver and reel, and then fall headlong to the ground; when, for aught you can see, there is no earthly cause for it. Let us sit still a moment and hear them."

I did as requested. Now, far away in the forest, the same dull, heavy roar would arise, linger a moment in the air, then die away. Then, nigh at hand, a rushing sound, as the broom-like top of some mighty pine swept through the air, would fall upon the ear, followed by the crash of broken boughs and the heavy thump of the huge trunk as it smote the earth. Then, far away, half smothered between the mountains, would rise again the dull roar, and we knew another monarch of the woods had yielded its life at an unknown summons.

I am free to confess, that John's remark as to the effect of such a phenomenon upon one, was then and there fully verified by myself. I know nothing more mysteriously solemn than this sound of falling trees coming up from the forest,—falling, so far as you can see, without cause. What unseen hand smites them? What pressure, unfelt by man, pushes their vast trunks over? Is it to the Spirit of the coming Storm they bow, prostrating themselves in anticipation of his chariot's approach? Is there some subtle and hostile chemistry in the air which penetrates their fibres, weakening them to their fall? Or do these aged patriarchs of the wood, with fearful prophecy, foresee their hour of doom, and, in the breathless lull ere the tempest breaks, yield like an ancient Roman to their fate?

"Perchance," I said to John, "He who noteth the falling of a sparrow and marketh the boundary of human life, hath given the trees a limit also, which they may not pass; and these are being summoned, and so go down."

— William H.H. Murray, Adventures in the Wilderness (1869), p. 104


Imagine preparing for a camping trip in 1869. There is no weather app. No radar. No television meteorologist. No hourly forecast. There is not even the friend who "heard it might rain," because in 1869 that friend was guessing too. If you wanted to know whether rain was coming, you might consult an almanac, read the local newspaper, study the clouds, or simply rely on experience, folklore, and a general sense of foreboding.

Yet those campers were not necessarily reckless. They used the best forecasting tools available to them. It was a short list, but they used it thoroughly. The story of how outdoor enthusiasts have predicted the weather over the last 160 years closely parallels the story of technological progress itself. From folk wisdom and printed almanacs to radio broadcasts, television forecasts, internet weather services, smartphones, and satellite communicators, campers have continually gained new ways to answer a timeless question: What's the weather going to do?

 A Timeline of Camping Weather Forecasts

 

| Era | How campers got the forecast |

 

| Before 1870 | Weather lore, local observation, almanacs |

| 1870s–1920s | Telegraph forecasts and newspapers |

| 1920s–1950s | Radio forecasts become widespread |

| 1950s–1980s | Television weather reports dominate |

| 1980s–1990s | The Weather Channel and computer forecasting advances |

| 1990s–2000s | Internet weather services |

| 2007–present | Smartphone weather apps |

| 2010s–present | Satellite communicators deliver forecasts in remote backcountry |

For much of the nineteenth century, weather prediction rested on observation and tradition rather than organized science. Campers, farmers, hunters, and travelers relied on weather lore passed down through generations. Popular sayings such as "Red sky at night, sailor's delight; red sky in morning, sailor's warning" were common throughout rural America.[1] Rhymes were the preferred format, presumably because a forecast that rhymes is easier to remember than one that is correct.

Many signs focused on animal behavior, cloud formations, wind direction, and atmospheric changes. Some had a scientific basis. Others were little more than superstition. Telling them apart was left as an exercise for the camper. Regardless of accuracy, such observations were often the most practical forecasting tools available to someone heading into the woods in the 1860s. Experienced outdoorsmen learned to watch the sky carefully. Long before meteorologists issued forecasts, nature itself served as the weather service.

The passage above is a good example of how that "weather service" worked in practice: a real observation attached to an uncertain explanation. It comes from Murray's account of camp life in the Adirondacks, in which his guide, John, insists that the sound of falling trees always comes before a storm. John does not know why. He has simply watched it happen, which in 1869 counted as peer review.

Trees do fall in dead calm. Forest researchers have found that heartwood rot can cause trees to fail on their own, even in calm conditions, and one survey of a Great Lakes forest found that more than two-thirds of the large trees studied had some degree of heart rot. In the aging forests of the Adirondacks, a great many giants may have been a small push from failing. A hollow tree does not need a supernatural summons. Gravity is patient.

What John could not know was whether those falls actually signaled rain. I couldn't find a study that has tested that link, and the pattern may owe as much to memory as to meteorology: trees fall in fair weather too, but only the falls followed by rain got remembered. The stillness that made the sound so eerie may also be part of the answer. In windless air, with no rustle of leaves to mask it, a fall miles away could be heard where it normally would not be. A forest, it turns out, is much easier to eavesdrop on when nothing is talking over it.

John's sign was probably an honest observation, and the ominous meaning came from Murray's own flourish. Murray, for his part, was busy promoting the Adirondacks, and "an unseen hand smites them" makes better copy than "the tree was rotten." That combination of careful noticing and unproven inference is what forecasting by nature looked like in the 1800s.

By the mid-nineteenth century, almanacs had become one of America's most important sources of weather information. Publications such as The Old Farmer's Almanac offered long-range weather predictions, astronomical information, seasonal observations, planting calendars, and practical advice (see below).[2] For a family planning a summer camping excursion or extended travel, an almanac offered something valuable: a forecast months in advance. Whether that forecast was correct was a separate question, and one we'll return to.

 

 

[Excerpt of July weather from The Farmer’s Almanac 1850.]

 

Accuracy varied widely, but these publications enjoyed enormous popularity because better alternatives did not yet exist. In many rural communities, almanacs remained a trusted source of weather guidance well into the early twentieth century. A confident tone, it turns out, carries a long way. They occupied a unique place between folklore and science, combining observation, tradition, astronomy, and prediction into a single annual reference.[2]

Brief Detour: What a Camper in 1880 Would Have Known

Imagine you're preparing for a weeklong camping trip in the Adirondacks in 1880. You likely own an almanac. You probably read a local newspaper. If you're particularly experienced, you've spent years learning to read cloud formations and changing winds.

You might know:
✓ The season is expected to be wetter or drier than average according to an almanac.
✓ Local weather conditions reported in the newspaper.
✓ Traditional weather lore learned from family, farmers, hunters, or mariners.
✓ What the sky looks like right now.

You would not know:
✗ Whether a storm is currently forming two states away.
✗ What tomorrow's forecast will be with any certainty.
✗ Whether severe weather is approaching your campsite.

One of the most important advances in weather forecasting had nothing to do with meteorology itself. It was the invention and expansion of the telegraph. Before telegraph networks, weather reports traveled only as fast as people could carry them. By the time news of a storm reached the next town, the storm often had too. The telegraph changed this by allowing observations from distant locations to be transmitted rapidly across the country.[3]

Beginning in 1849, the Smithsonian Institution organized a growing network of observers who submitted weather reports by telegraph. By 1860, hundreds of stations were reporting conditions daily.[3] For the first time, meteorologists could see weather patterns developing over large regions rather than simply recording local conditions after storms arrived. Documenting a storm after it hit had, until then, been the state of the art. This capability eventually led to organized forecasting efforts.

In 1870, Congress authorized a national weather service under the U.S. Army Signal Corps, laying the foundation for what would later become the National Weather Service.[4] The Army may seem an odd home for a weather service, but the Signal Corps ran telegraphs, and telegraphs were the whole game. For campers and travelers, weather forecasting was no longer limited to local observation. Storms could increasingly be tracked as they moved from one area to another.

By the late nineteenth century, newspapers had become the primary means by which weather forecasts reached the public. Daily weather reports began appearing alongside national and local news. Weather maps and telegraph-based forecasts gave readers a much broader understanding of upcoming conditions than previous generations had ever enjoyed.[5]

A camper preparing for a weekend trip in 1895 could buy a morning paper and learn about weather systems developing hundreds of miles away. Forecasts were not always issued daily, and some covered several days or even a week at a time. Accuracy remained limited by modern standards, but the forecast was printed in ink, which has always lent a certain authority, and forecasting was becoming increasingly scientific. As newspapers improved, almanacs gradually lost their role as the principal source of weather prediction. They remained popular and widely read, but daily newspaper forecasts increasingly guided practical decisions involving travel and outdoor recreation.[5] Even so, if you time-travel back to a 19th century campground, Gore-Tex rain gear should be at the top of your packing list.

 

The arrival of radio in the 1920s transformed weather communication. Instead of reading forecasts in newspapers, Americans could hear updated information broadcast directly into their homes. Weather reports became a regular feature of radio programming, making forecasts more immediate and accessible than ever before.[5]

 

For campers and vacationing families, radio offered a major advantage. Weather information could be received shortly before departure instead of relying on a newspaper printed hours earlier. Severe weather warnings also became more effective. Communities could receive alerts quickly when storms threatened, improving public safety and reducing dependence on rumor or delayed reports. Rumor, which had long held a monopoly on the job, lost market share. By the mid-twentieth century, radio forecasts had largely surpassed almanacs as the primary source of practical weather information for most Americans.[5]

In this era, auto campers were the only ones who could bring a radio along to the campground, since the sets were large and heavy (see above). Even after transistor radios arrived, only some campers carried one on foot. Anyone counting ounces mostly decided the sky was lighter.

Brief Detour: What a Camper in 1925 Would Have Known

By 1925, camping had entered the automobile age. You can now listen to weather reports on the radio before leaving home. Newspapers provide increasingly sophisticated forecasts generated from telegraph-based observation networks. Compared to a camper in 1880, however, your confidence in the forecast is significantly higher.

You might know:
✓ Today's forecast.
✓ Regional weather trends.
✓ Storm warnings issued by forecasting agencies.

You would still not know:
✗ Real-time storm movement.
✗ Localized hourly forecasts.
✗ Mountain-specific weather conditions

Even as radio and newspapers improved forecasts at home, campers in federal parks and forests still depended on the people who ran them. In the early twentieth century, the ranger station was the central hub for weather information at many campgrounds. Rangers received forecasts at park headquarters by mail, telegraph, or telephone, then wrote out the daily report by hand and posted it on wooden bulletin boards at entrance stations and busy campgrounds (above). It was low-tech, durable, and immune to dead batteries.

Warnings also traveled by voice. Beginning in the 1920s, the National Park Service's evening campfire programs, best remembered for storytelling, gave rangers a way to warn a large group of campers about approaching weather, active wildlife, or trail closures. A captive audience with marshmallows remains hard to beat as a delivery system. Farther out, rangers on horseback patrolled deep into the backcountry, carrying message logs and warning dispersed campers directly or hand-delivering evacuation notices when a severe storm or forest fire approached.

Behind the scenes, the network kept growing. In the 1910s and 1920s, the U.S. Forest Service strung miles of single-wire telephone lines through trees across federal lands, letting rangers in remote fire lookout towers call down to base stations on crank telephones the moment they spotted lightning or smoke. In effect, the trees were drafted as utility poles. By the mid-1930s, federal agencies had begun adopting portable two-way radios. Rangers could receive instant weather updates from regional hubs and pass warnings to the public through bulletin boards or by telling campers to tune their car radios to local frequencies.[6]

Television weather forecasting emerged during the 1950s and became a central part of American life in the decades that followed (left). For the first time, viewers could actually see weather maps, fronts, pressure systems, and storm tracks. Fronts, previously a matter of faith, now came with arrows. Meteorologists could visually explain atmospheric developments rather than relying solely on spoken or printed descriptions.

This period also coincided with tremendous growth in recreational camping. Following World War II, improved highways, automobile ownership, and expanding public parks brought camping into the mainstream. Before departing for a campground or national park, many families checked the evening weather forecast. A meteorologist gesturing at a map became one of the most trusted people in the county. Meanwhile, advances in meteorological science continued. Forecasts benefited from weather balloons, radar systems, satellites, and increasingly powerful computers that made forecasting more accurate than ever before.[4]

Brief Detour: What a Camper in 1955 Would Have Known

The family station wagon is packed. Canvas tents and aluminum coolers are loaded. Before leaving for the campground, everyone gathers around the television. For the first time in history, weather can be seen as well as heard.

You might know:
✓ Forecast highs and lows.
✓ Rain chances for the next day or two.
✓ Storm locations shown on weather maps.
✓ Hurricane and severe weather warnings.

You would still lack:
✗ Interactive radar.
✗ Long-range detailed forecasts.
✗ Instant weather updates while traveling.

Almanacs never actually disappeared. The Old Farmer's Almanac and the Farmers' Almanac remain popular today, but their role changed significantly during the twentieth century. Throughout the late 1800s and early 1900s, almanacs filled a critical need because reliable daily forecasts were difficult to obtain. By the middle of the twentieth century, however, radio and television provided more timely information and increasingly accurate short-range forecasts.[5]

As a result, almanacs transitioned from practical forecasting tools to cultural and historical publications. Readers continued buying them for gardening information, astronomy content, folklore, recipes, and tradition, but most travelers relied on professional meteorological forecasts when making outdoor plans. (If you are curious what sort of recipes campers prepared in the past we explore that in Trail Grub and Trail Hydration).

One reason campers still buy almanacs today is the long-term forecast. I decided to test this myself. I have bought The Old Farmer's Almanac two years in a row, and I used it to plan my vacation time four to five months in advance for a few backpacking trips. I was remarkably surprised at how accurate the predictions about general seasonal trends were in both years. However, modern studies have found that almanacs' long-term predictions are rarely more accurate than a coin flip, and they should be trusted accordingly. So, either I got lucky in the two years I tried, or I'm incredibly gullible. The fact that I spent money on not one but two almanacs in the twenty-first century probably favors the latter.

A notable exemption from many guidebooks in the first century of recreational camping is weather forecasting. Nearly none I have referenced address the topic. One thorough 1961 guide nearly 600 pages long covers everything from air travel to underwear, but not weather forecasts. The lack of advice may simply be that the authors assumed people knew how to handle this task.

For weather enthusiasts, the launch of The Weather Channel in 1982 marked another major milestone. Weather information became available twenty-four hours a day. Campers could now check forecasts continuously instead of waiting for a scheduled segment during the news. All one had to do was survive the screeching, alien-like noise that served as the soundtrack of getting on the net in the 1990s.

Even more important was the rise of advanced computer forecasting models. Meteorologists gained increasingly sophisticated tools for simulating atmospheric conditions and predicting storm movement. Forecast accuracy steadily improved throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and outdoor enthusiasts planning backpacking trips, canoe expeditions, and mountain climbs benefited from forecasts that grew more detailed and reliable.

Brief Detour: What a Camper in 1995 Would Have Known

The internet is beginning to change everything. Before leaving for a camping trip, you might sit down at a desktop computer and pull up a weather website. For the first time, ordinary campers have access to many of the same forecasting tools previously reserved for meteorologists and government agencies. The challenge is that once you leave home, the forecast typically stays behind.

You can now access:
✓ Multi-day forecasts.
✓ Weather radar images.
✓ Satellite imagery.
✓ Regional weather discussions.
✓ Severe weather alerts.

The internet revolutionized weather forecasting for ordinary citizens. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, weather websites like weather.com (above) allowed users to access forecasts whenever they wanted. Radar images, satellite photographs, hourly forecasts, precipitation predictions, and severe weather alerts became available from home computers.[5]

Campers no longer needed to rely on generalized regional forecasts. They could examine detailed weather information for specific destinations, often days before departure. For many outdoor enthusiasts, weather forecasting shifted from a passive activity to an active one. Rather than simply consuming forecasts provided by newspapers or broadcasters, users began exploring large amounts of weather data themselves.

Forecasts also became more precise about altitude. Mountains generate their own weather, and temperatures typically fall several degrees Fahrenheit for every thousand feet climbed, so a forecast for the trailhead town can badly misjudge conditions at a high camp, a fact many hikers learn the hard way, usually in a T-shirt. Elevation-specific tools like Mountain-Forecast.com (below on right), along with the National Weather Service's forecast tables that list details such as the freezing level, let backpackers check conditions closer to the altitude where they will actually be.[7]

The introduction of smartphones brought perhaps the greatest change in everyday weather awareness. Modern weather applications deliver forecasts, radar imagery, severe weather alerts, lightning tracking, wind predictions, and detailed hourly data directly to users' pockets.

For campers, weather information is now available almost anywhere cellular service exists. Forecasts can be checked repeatedly before and during trips, allowing plans to be adjusted as conditions change.[7a] Compared to the newspapers and almanacs of the nineteenth century, the amount of available information is almost unimaginable. I routinely consult two to three weather apps before leaving on a trip to compare sources. I realize that makes me sound nerdy, but here you are reading an article about the history of weather forecasts. So who's nerdy now?

Most backpacking and camping trips last only three to four days, with the vast majority under a week. Modern forecasts are reliable enough that you can screenshot the forecast before leaving and trust it reasonably well for seven to eight days. Some websites offer forecasts fourteen days out or more, but experts advise treating anything beyond about eight days with caution, since it 

is right only about 50 to 60 percent of the time. Data that far out is better for general trends, such as cooler or warmer, wetter or drier than average.

 
One thing that has not changed is how ranger stations share weather reports. Today, weather warnings are still printed and posted on bulletin boards to inform campers. Technology has advanced enormously, but the humble bulletin board endures.

Despite all these advances, one problem persisted. Many of the most desirable camping and backpacking destinations remain beyond cellular coverage. For decades, campers venturing into remote wilderness areas often lost access to updated forecasts once they left civilization behind. Any weather information they carried into the backcountry was effectively frozen in time.Modern satellite communicators have largely solved that problem. Devices such as the Garmin inReach (left) can receive weather updates through satellite networks even when users are far beyond traditional cellular coverage. Backpackers, paddlers, hunters, and mountaineers can request updated forecasts deep within remote wilderness areas.[7b] (If you ever wondered what other sorts of electronics campers and backpackers have carried into the woods, check out Camper's Love-Hate Relationship with Electronics)

For today's camper, this capability would seem almost magical to someone from the 1860s. A person standing alone in a mountain valley can now receive weather information generated from satellites orbiting Earth, analyzed by supercomputers, and transmitted through space directly into the palm of their hand.

I have used such data on several occasions over the past ten years. I have found it most helpful on longer expeditions that last a week or more. For my weekend backpacking trips, it seemed more guy-with-gadgets than experienced-backpacker-extraordinaire. I always aim to look like the latter. Of course, this kind of backcountry access is not universal, because it still comes at a cost. Perhaps in the future it will become the default and we will all be as constantly connected to the weather as we are in the city. For now, we old-timers will continue to settle for the ancient tech: our eyeballs.

Brief Detour: What a Backpacker Knows Today

Imagine a backpacker standing beside an alpine lake hundreds of miles from the nearest city. They carry a smartphone, GPS receiver, digital maps, emergency communications equipment, and possibly a satellite communicator. This camper possesses more weather information than the most experienced meteorologist of the nineteenth century could have imagined. And yet, they still glance at the clouds.


They can potentially access:
✓ Hour-by-hour forecasts.
✓ Real-time radar.
✓ Lightning alerts.
✓ Wind predictions.
✓ Satellite imagery.
✓ Severe weather warnings.
✓ Updated forecasts delivered through satellite communications

The history of weather forecasting in camping reflects the broader history of technology itself. Campers progressed from weather folklore and annual almanacs to telegraph-based forecasting networks, daily newspapers, radio broadcasts, television weather reports, internet forecasting services, smartphones, and satellite communicators. Each technological advance brought greater accuracy, faster information, and improved safety.

Yet one thing has remained unchanged. Experienced campers still watch the sky. Cloud formations, shifting winds, falling temperatures, and distant thunder continue to provide clues that no technology can entirely replace. The tools have changed dramatically, but the instinct to pay attention to nature remains as valuable today as it was 160 years ago.

Modern experts still stress this instinct. Outdoor educators and organizations such as the Washington Trails Association and Backpacker recommend checking the forecast before leaving, then watching the clouds and pressure changes once on the trail.[8] For many people who live in cities, reading the sky has become something of a lost art, yet in the backcountry it fills the gap between forecast updates. These skills are not more accurate than a modern forecast, and no one should treat them as a replacement. What they offer is a real-time read on the sky right where you are standing, which can help you decide to take shelter instead of pressing on, even when the forecast says the weather should hold.[9] The forecast, after all, isn't the one standing under the cloud.

Whether a camper in 1869 studied a red sunset, a family in 1955 listened to a radio forecast, or a backpacker today requests an inReach weather update from a satellite hundreds of miles overhead, they are all trying to answer the same enduring question: Will tomorrow bring sunshine, or rain?


By David F. Garner

Appendix: Photos

                               

[Paddlers mount portable radio system with mobile antenna rig into canoe as proof of concept, c. 1920]

 

 

[Fire towers like this one at the summit of Mount Uncanoonuc in New Hampshire were also used in their early days to spot approaching severe weather. c. 1920s]

[Bulletin boards are one campground technology that has changed little over the years. c. 2018]

Sources

[1] National Weather Service. "Weather Lore and Folklore." National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Available through the National Weather Service educational resources.


[2] The Old Farmer's Almanac. https://www.almanac.com


[3] National Weather Service. History of the National Weather Service Timeline. Discusses telegraph-based weather observation networks established by the Smithsonian beginning in 1849 and their role in forecasting. weather.gov


[4] National Weather Service. History of the National Weather Service. Notes creation of the U.S. weather forecasting service in 1870 and the technological progression from telegraphs to radar, satellites, and modern forecasting systems. weather.gov; popularmechanics.com


[5] National Weather Service. NOAA Weather Wire Service History. Describes the evolution of weather information distribution through telegraphs, radio, television, satellite communications, and internet delivery systems. weather.gov; en.wikipedia.org


[6] "History of Fire Lookouts in Snoqualmie," Snoqualmie Fire Lookouts, accessed September 22, 2026, https://www.snoqualmielookouts.org//lookout-history.


[7] "Hiking Weather Basics: The Complete Guide for Safe Trails." Goat Wanderlust. https://www.goatwanderlust.com/hiking-weather-basics/


[7a] Skurka, Andrew. "Tutorial: Predicting backcountry weather conditions." https://andrewskurka.com/backcountry-weather-conditions-forecasting-methods-sources/


[7b] "Reading Weather on the Trail: What Hikers Need to Know." Going Gear. https://goinggear.com/blogs/going-prepared/reading-weather-on-the-trail-what-hikers-need-to-know


[8] Washington Trails Association. "How to Predict Mountain Weather." https://www.wta.org/go-outside/trail-smarts/how-to/how-to-predict-mountain-weather


[9] Backpacker. "Backcountry Weather Forecasting Skills All Hikers Should Know." https://www.backpacker.com/skills/beginner-skills/backcountry-weather-forecasting/

 

Comfort on the Trail: A Bouncy History of Backpacking Sleeping Pads and Camping Mats

 

“Camping is the art of getting closer to nature while getting farther away from the nearest cold beverage, hot shower, and flush toilet.” — Anonymous


If you have ever wondered about the history of backpacking gear, the evolution of camping equipment, or why modern sleeping pads look nothing like the bedrolls and bough beds of earlier outdoor travelers, this is the surprisingly squishy corner of outdoor gear history where those stories meet.

Every camper eventually meets the same ancient question: how much misery is too much misery? A glowing sunset can make you feel profound, a crackling fire can make you feel heroic, and then one badly placed root under your hip can reduce the whole wilderness experience to a negotiation with your own spine. Humans have always had a complicated relationship with nature. Nature feeds us, inspires us, and gives us the kind of sunrise that makes a person briefly consider becoming a poet. It also gives us rocks under the hip, roots under the shoulder blade, cold ground, wet socks, and the occasional mosquito with personal ambitions. Living indoors solves many of these problems, but it also separates us from the good stuff. Camping is wonderful because it lets us choose our own level of discomfort. The camping mat is where that choice becomes very personal.

 
The “camping mat,” also known as the “sleeping pad,” or “worthless thing” after waking up sore, is a perfect symbol of this bargain. It is not the flashiest piece of outdoor gear. It does not gleam like a stove, slice like a knife, or make you look rugged like a catalog photo. But at 2:17 a.m., when the temperature drops and the ground begins explaining geology to your ribs, the humble mat becomes the most important object in the universe.

 
Campers have drawn their own lines around this bargain for centuries. Some believe a mat contaminates the purity of the outdoor experience and prefer to use whatever the forest floor provides. These are often the bushcraft types with strong opinions about what counts as “real” camping. At the other end are campers who treat the phrase “camping mattress” as an invitation to bring something roughly the size of a king-size Tempur-Pedic in an RV. Backpackers, naturally, live somewhere in the middle: forever chasing the dream of a bed that is light, warm, compact, durable, affordable, and somehow not terrible.
This essay follows the evolution of backpacking sleep mats because that is where the engineering gets especially fun—and where the compromises get especially ridiculous. 

The history of the sleeping pad touches almost every era of camping gear history, from vintage camping equipment and bushcraft bedding to ultralight backpacking gear and modern insulated pads. If you carry everything on your back, every ounce and cubic inch matters, but so does the ability to stand upright the next morning. A quick warning before we unroll this thing: the history of camping mats is surprisingly poorly chronicled. As far as I can tell, this may be one of the few attempts to trace the development of camp-mat technology across roughly 160 years. That makes the story a little patchy in places, but also more interesting. Like many good camping trips, it involves improvisation, questionable decisions, and a surprising amount of foam.

From Bough Beds to Backpacking Pads

[Tent with bough bed]

 

In the late nineteenth century, the common camp bed was not a product so much as a small landscaping project. Campers laid down a deep layer of fresh boughs, often about a foot thick, and covered it with a canvas or wool blanket. If they could get one, a rubber-coated blanket was even better. A waxed blanket could also help. The thickness depended on the season: lighter for summer, heavier for winter. William H. H. Murray, author of one of the first recreational camping guides, expected many readers to hire a professional guide for wilderness travel, so he did not dwell much on bed construction. Presumably, the guide knew which trees could be turned into a mattress and which ones would simply poke you all night.

John M. Gould’s 1877 guide, How To Camp Out, offered much more practical detail. Gould described how to make a camp bed and, importantly, recognized that not every camper wanted the same experience. Some wanted to travel light. Others wanted to sleep like people who had not personally offended the ground. For those traveling with a wagon, Gould recommended taking a mattress.

For backpackers, however, mattresses were still too large and bulky to be practical. The modern dedicated camping pad had not yet arrived, so anyone traveling on foot needed either ingenuity, tolerance, or a very forgiving spine. George Washington Sears, the legendary woodsman better known as “Nessmuk,” also favored the bough bed. In his 1884 classic Woodcraft and Camping, he described how to build one in detail. The message was clear: if you wanted comfort, first learn to become part carpenter, part botanist, and part forest-floor interior decorator.

Soldiers and hunters of this era often carried large sacks, sometimes called a “browse bag,” or a “tick” that could be stuffed with grasses, straw, or other material. Campers sometimes chose these as well. As we can see, beds made of natural debris were the main option for anyone traveling on foot. Natural materials were not always plentiful. [1] [2]

Debris was not the only solution though. Fur was common in colder climates. As Martin Hogue notes in Making Camp, humans have for centuries worn fur skins that doubled as parka and sleeping bag/mat. [3] Others opted for a raised bed. They would build a temporary cot using a piece of fabric or skin stretched over a wood frame improvised at camp from local materials. [4] In those days many things were made from local materials at camp including many menu items. For a history of food options in camp see Trail Grub.

For those that could afford the bulk, a portable mat could be made by hand stitching. A wool blanket would be folded in half and stitched around all the edges. Then this was stuffed with batting to the desired thickness while balancing weight and comfort. Batting was frequently made of wool, hair, kapok, or cotton. These were often referred to as kapok mattresses or horsehair mattresses. [5] The batting was generally stuffed loosely to allow the mat to be rolled or folded and strapped to the pack. These could also be purchased ready-made. They did not add significant comfort but they did add insulation between the camper and the ground. 

[Kapok style mat bedroll c. 1920s] 

Whatever a camper used underneath, nearly all carried the same basic gear. A water-resistant blanket that went underneath and could be folded over top, and a wool or fur blanket for insulation. These two essential items made up the bedroll. These can often be seen in period films like Civil War movies and Westerns. 

The Long, Leaky History of the Air Mattress

Air mattresses have been around longer than most think. Attempts to make them stretch as far back as the 16th century. A Frenchman named William Dujardin created a “wind bed” using waxed canvas. They were briefly popular in fashionable circles. They did not hold air well and quickly deflated along with Dujardin’s aspirations. [6]

A few centuries later, rubber succeeded where canvas failed. Moldable vulcanized rubber was patented in 1844 thanks to the obsessive work of Charles Goodyear. One 1850 account of a family crossing the frontier for the Gold Rush to California reported a rubber air mattress among their equipment. It was carried in their wagon and could be emptied each morning and stowed away till needed again. [7] Rubber also enabled more water-proof garments and blankets to keep out rain and moister.

[Ad for a rubberized blanket, c. 1920s]

It would be some time before the air mattress was light enough to carry in a backpack. They became popular for campers who traveled by wagon or boat. Mountaineers are the ones who first began carrying small inflatable mattresses in their packs. Clinton T. Dent describes his method in his 1892 book Mountaineering. He places the mattress inside the sleeping bag rather than outside. This implies the mattress was not insulated. [8]

 

[Ad for 1918 air mattress recommended by the U.S. Forest Service] 

By the early twentieth century, camping gear makers were also trying to solve the sleep problem by combining several pieces of equipment into one clever contraption. The sleeping bag, the mattress, and sometimes even the shelter were folded into integrated systems. Some were ingenious. Some were probably better admired in a catalog than carried into the woods. Either way, the period shows how unsettled outdoor sleep design still was. Campers wanted warmth, dryness, comfort, convenience, and a lighter load, but nobody had quite figured out how to give them all of it at once.

Early air mattresses were still bulky enough that they made the most sense for canoeists, horse travelers, car campers, and anyone else who was not counting every ounce. The line between sleeping bag and mattress also stayed blurry. Horace Kephart, one of the great early outdoor writers, described combined sleeping-bag-and-air-mattress systems with obvious appreciation but also with a practical camper’s skepticism.

“There are sleeping bags combined with air mattresses, full-length or only “body size,” that are good for canoe cruising, horseback journeys, or other trips when camp is changed every day or so and good sites are not always to be found. They save much work, and sometimes a good deal of anxiety. There is then no night wood to cut, no browse to gather, no tent to trench, and little bother about smoothing the ground. Wherever one may be, in damp forest or on sandy dune, on rocky ground or mucky ground, down goes the bundle, it is unrolled, and one inflates his “blow bed” with the bellows that nature gave him. In ten minutes he is assured of a dry, warm, elastic bed for the night, in spite of Jupiter Pluvius, or Boreas, or both of them allied. If water runs in on the floor, let it run. If the tent blows down, let it alone until you feel like getting up. Come morning there is no bed making to do, if you are too hurried to air things, except to deflate the mattress and roll the bag up. It straps into a waterproof pack that stows conveniently anywhere. But such a bed is quite expensive. For ordinary service, blankets and a bed tick will do just as well. In any case, study your health and your ease at night. There is a veteran’s wisdom in what Chauncey Thomas says: “I go camping to have a good time, and a third of that time is spent in bed.” [9]

[L.L. Bean sold a model that was the epitome of these strategies c. 1929]

 

As materials improved, the air mattress became a more serious piece of camp gear. One of the most recognizable mid-century names was Li-Lo. The company began selling compact inflatable mats in the 1930s and remained a familiar presence for decades, especially in the United Kingdom. Li-Lo also made pool floats, and the name eventually became one of those brand names people use as if it were the thing itself.

For campers, Li-Lo’s appeal was not just novelty. Its sleeping mats developed a reputation for durability, and some models used two separate air compartments so a single puncture would not necessarily ruin the night. A small round bellows could be carried for inflation, which spared campers from ending a long day by turning themselves lightheaded at bedtime.

Of course, not every camper bought a purpose-made air mattress. Outdoor people have always been good at improvising gear from whatever is lying around the garage, and some used bicycle inner tubes tucked between blankets as a homemade air bed. Boy Scouts were especially known for this sort of practical tinkering. It was not elegant, but elegance has never been a requirement for sleeping slightly better outdoors. To learn how campers have seen after dark to get ready for sleep read From Lanterns to Headlamps.

The problem was that air by itself did not solve everything. An air mattress could lift a camper off roots and stones, but it did little to stop heat from draining into the ground. Campers often still needed a wool blanket, pad, or other insulating layer underneath them. Comfort and insulation were related, but they were not the same problem. [10]

The 1950s brought lighter and tougher inflatable mats. Earlier air mattresses were often made of rubberized canvas, but Goodyear began producing camp air mattresses with rubberized nylon from DuPont. That change mattered: nylon helped reduce weight while keeping the mattress strong enough for actual outdoor use. [11]

Closed-Cell Foam and the Birth of the Modern Sleeping Pad

Even so, the inflatable mattress still had a cold-ground problem. The next major leap came not from a backpacking company but from foam chemistry. Ensolite, developed by the U.S. Rubber Company, was a closed-cell foam that trapped air inside tiny sealed pockets. It was light, resilient, and unusually useful anywhere insulation, cushioning, flotation, or impact absorption mattered. [12]

Ensolite appears to have entered outdoor use through military and cold-weather applications. The U.S. Air Force tested it in boots in 1951, and the material performed well enough that Ensolite-insulated boots were issued soon after. Civilian boots followed by 1953. [13] [14] From there, using the material under a sleeping bag was not a wild leap. Mountaineers, always willing to experiment if it meant surviving a colder night, seem to have recognized its value early. A 1954 Mount Rainier rescue report describes rescuers using an Ensolite pad with a sleeping bag to keep an injured climber warm; the pad even doubled as a sled across the snow. [15]

Once Ensolite proved useful, U.S. Rubber found applications everywhere. It appeared in winter clothing, gloves, flotation devices, and protective equipment. The same qualities that made it good under a sleeping bag—closed cells, trapped air, resilience, and low weight—also made it useful in life jackets, football helmets, knee pads, and gymnastics mats. A humble foam sleeping pad was part of a much broader mid-century material revolution.

 

[Ensolite pad atop a backpack c. 1980s]

 

For backpackers, the important point was simple: closed-cell foam could insulate without needing to be inflated. It could not pop, it could be cut to size, and it kept working when dirty, wet, dented, or abused. It was not luxurious. Nobody mistook a thin foam pad for a featherbed. But it changed the basic expectations for sleeping outside.

By the end of the 1950s, Ensolite was becoming recognizable as a camp sleeping pad. One of the earliest general camping-guide mentions appears in All About Camping from 1962, where Merrill discusses it in connection with snow camping. His advice closely echoes the U.S. Naval Medical School’s 1961 Polar Manual, which recommended placing an Ensolite pad on top of an air mattress such as a Li-Lo. [16] Colin Fletcher later gave Ensolite another boost by mentioning it in his influential 1968 book The Complete Walker. [17]

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, foam pads were moving from improvised or specialist use into ordinary camping retail. Stores sold them in several thicknesses and precut lengths. Backpackers learned to save weight by carrying three-quarter-length or even two-thirds-length pads, discovering that not every inch of a body required equal luxury. U.S. Rubber, renamed Uniroyal, also began selling pads directly to outdoor consumers, with advertisements appearing in newspapers and magazines during the 1970s. [18] (If you would like to learn about how camping permits have change since the midcentury, visit Papering The Wilderness)

Foam pads then multiplied. New brands and new formulations appeared, and Ensolite’s name became almost generic for a foam camp mat. The original material still compares respectably with some later products: a common one-quarter inch Ensolite pad had an R-value around 1.05. That is not a palace floor, but it is enough to make a cold night more survivable.

What makes Ensolite especially interesting is that its camping use seems to have grown organically. It was not born as a sleek backpacking lifestyle product. It was a useful industrial material that cold-weather travelers, soldiers, mountaineers, and eventually backpackers adopted because it solved a problem. That may be why it became so influential: it was not glamorous, but it worked.

While foam was gaining ground, inflatable mattresses were still evolving. Stebco, a major American air-mattress maker, supplied mattresses used on expeditions in the 1960s, showing that serious outdoor travelers had not abandoned air comfort just because foam had arrived. [19]

[Stebco air mattress c. 1960s]

Stebco is one of those names that deserves more attention in outdoor gear history. Before it became associated with portable air mattresses, the company had manufactured goods for the World War II war effort under the name Frank Mashek Company. By the postwar period, it was well positioned to turn industrial know-how into consumer outdoor gear.

In the 1950s, Stebco began selling portable air mattresses that appealed to mountaineers, campers, and eventually backpackers. [20] As backpacking surged in the 1960s and 1970s, Stebco marketed to people who wanted real sleep comfort but were still willing to carry some extra weight to get it. [21] For a while, Stebco produced some of the leading lightweight air mattresses on the market. But outdoor gear history is full of perfectly respectable products that were overtaken by one better idea. In Stebco’s case, that idea was the self-inflating, insulated sleeping pad. [22]

Therm-a-Rest and the Self-Inflating Backpacking Pad

That brings us to Therm-a-Rest, the brand that changed the category so completely that many campers now treat the self-inflating pad as if it had always existed. The idea began in 1971, when three avid climbers set out to make an air mattress that was also insulated. Production of the first model, the Standard 3/4, began in 1973. Two of the founders were former Boeing engineers, which feels exactly right: only backpackers would celebrate aerospace competence by sleeping on the ground. [23]

Therm-a-Rest arrived at the perfect moment. Recreational backpacking was growing fast, and a new generation of hikers wanted gear that was lighter, more compact, and more comfortable. Even so, the company did not become dominant overnight. Colin Fletcher did not mention Therm-a-Rest in The New Complete Walker in 1976. By The Complete Walker III in 1984, however, he was discussing the company as a major force that had surpassed much of the competition.

[Therm-a-Rest Standard 3/4 c. 1975]

The brilliance of the Therm-a-Rest design was that it joined cushioning and insulation in one package. Open-cell foam inside the mattress expanded when the valve opened, drawing in air; the foam also helped reduce heat loss. Fletcher praised the result, noting that Therm-a-Rest was at least as comfortable as an air mattress and insulated better than most foam pads. For backpackers, that combination was revolutionary.

Therm-a-Rest did not stop with self-inflating pads. In 1986 it introduced the RidgeRest, a roll-up closed-cell foam pad with ridges molded into the surface. The ridges trapped warmth, added some cushioning, and gave backpackers yet another object to strap awkwardly to the outside of a pack. Later, the company developed the folding accordion-style Z Lite, with its now-familiar egg-carton texture. The folding design solved one of the great foam-pad annoyances: the mat’s deep desire to curl itself back into a tube the moment you looked away. [24] [25]

The Z Lite became iconic because it was simple, durable, and nearly impossible to use incorrectly—although campers still managed to debate which side should face up. That is part of the charm of outdoor gear culture: give people a rectangle of foam and they will form schools of philosophy around it. Therm-a-Rest, under Cascade Designs, popularized this accordion-style folding pad and helped make it a standard sight on long-distance trails, often carried proudly on top of a pack like a yellow-and-silver badge of mild discomfort. [26] [27]

 

Therm-a-Rest remains one of the giants of the category, but it certainly did not get the last word. As backpacking split into traditional, lightweight, and ultralight camps, sleeping pads followed. Some hikers wanted plush inflatable comfort. Others wanted the lightest foam sheet that could technically be described as “not the ground.” Both groups, naturally, believed they were the reasonable ones.

One important name in the ultralight world is Gossamer Gear, founded in 1998 with a focus on extremely light backpacking equipment. Its Thinlight pad pushes minimalism almost to the point of satire: a one-eighth-inch closed-cell foam sheet measuring 59 by 19 inches and weighing only 2.7 ounces. It is less a mattress than a polite suggestion to the ground. But for gram-counters, it offers just enough cushioning, just enough insulation, and a surprising amount of versatility as a sit pad, frame sheet, or emergency layer.

[Gossamer Gear Thinlight c. 2020]

 

That ultralight impulse brings the story back to where it began. The earliest campers slept on boughs, grass, skins, and whatever they could gather. Modern ultralight hikers may carry space-age foam instead, but the underlying idea is surprisingly similar: use as little as possible, accept a little hardship, and call it freedom.

Space Blankets, R-Values, and Modern Camping Sleep Systems

There is just enough room in this story to squeeze in one last strange but important entry: the space blanket, also known as the Mylar blanket. At first glance it seems less like a sleeping pad and more like something handed to marathon finishers, rescue victims, and people who have made poor decisions despite the meteorologist's warnings. But it belongs here because it tackles the same old enemy from another angle: heat loss. A space blanket is a thin plastic sheet with a metallic coating that reflects radiant heat and blocks moisture at very low weight. Fully wrapping yourself in one can add meaningful warmth, though it also makes you look as if you are being prepared for leftovers.

[Mylar type emergency Blanket]

 

Like so many outdoor materials, reflective film moved through science, industry, and emergency use before becoming normal camping gear. Metal-coated plastic films were developed in the mid-twentieth century, and NASA helped popularize related reflective materials through the space program. There is something wonderfully circular about that: humans developed materials to escape Earth, then used them to sleep more comfortably on it. From there, they spread into the packs of campers trying to squeeze a few more degrees out of a cold night. [28] [29]

Reflective layers eventually found their way onto sleeping pads too. They do not turn a thin foam mat into a heated mattress, despite what a desperate camper might hope at 3 a.m., but they can help. The original Therm-a-Rest Z Lite had an R-value around 1.7, while the later reflective Z Lite Sol rose to about 2.0. A gain of 0.3 sounds laughably small until you are lying on frozen ground wondering how much dignity you would trade for one more degree of warmth. In the backcountry, tiny improvements can feel large.

[Therm-a-Rest Z-Lite Sol c. 2025]

 

The history of the camping mat is really the history of campers trying to make an unreasonable activity slightly more reasonable. It is also a small but revealing chapter in the larger evolution of outdoor gear. We want wild places, but we also want circulation in our hips. We want to travel light, but we do not want to feel every root personally. Over the last century and a half, that desire has produced bough beds, ticks, fur robes, horsehair pads, rubber air mattresses, closed-cell foam, self-inflating pads, accordion mats, ultralight foam sheets, and reflective films borrowed from the space age.

And still, the perfect backpacking bed remains just out of reach. Every generation seems to believe it is one material breakthrough away from solving outdoor sleep forever. Maybe someday we will have a pad that is weightless, warm, silent, indestructible, inexpensive, and as comfortable as home. Until then, the search continues—and so does the ancient camping ritual of rolling over at midnight, adjusting the pad, and pretending that this time, finally, you have found the soft spot.

For anyone interested in vintage backpacking gear, camping equipment history, or the strange little innovations that make nights outdoors more bearable, the sleeping pad is a reminder that even the least glamorous gear can carry a long story.

 

 

By David F. Garner
 

Sources

[1] Ruadhán Scrivener-Anderson, “WW1 Officer's Valise and Contents,” Jun 17, 2022, Dr Ruadhán Scrivener-Anderson, 5:08, https://youtu.be/41oPH3dQgac?si=DVefiwPWdHkyD9QP.


[2] Cpt. Whitehall, “Civil War Sleeping Bag,” May 5, 2019, Company D 2nd USSS, 8:26, https://youtu.be/yQD1udrTlWA?si=oSwPghtyidvoRAqV.


[3] Martin Hogue, Making Camp: A Visual History of Camping's Most Essential Items and Activities, chapter 7, “Sleeping Bag,” Kindle edition, p. 248.


[4] George O. Shields, Camping and Camp Outfits, (Rand, McNally & Company Publishers, 1890), 33-34, URL.


[5] E. Kreps, Camp and Trail Methods, Chapter V, Cooking Utensils, Beds and Bedding, A. R. Harding Pub, 1910, pg 46-54.


[6] Wohleber, Curt. “The Mattress.” Invention & Technology Magazine 21, no. 4 (Spring 2006). https://www.inventionandtech.com/content/mattress-0?page=2.


[7] Kenneth L. Holmes, ed., Best of Covered Wagon Women (University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 45.


[8] Clinton T. Dent, Mountaineering (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1892), 64, URL.


[9] Horace Kephart, The Book of Camping and Woodcraft: A Guidebook for Those Who Travel in the Wilderness (New York: Outing Publishing Co., 1906), 135.


[10] Fordyce, C. P. “Autocamping Beds.” Outdoor Life 55, no. 6 (June 1925): 478–79. Digitized by Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/sim_outdoor-life_1925-06_55_6.


[11] “DuPont Nylon Air Mattress,” Outdoor Life 115, no. 2 (February 1955): 26, digitized by Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/sim_outdoor-life_1955-02_115_2.


[12] Daly, Lawrence E., and Robert W. Pooley. Process of making cellular material. US Patent 2,570,182, filed July 23, 1948, and issued October 9, 1951. https://patents.google.com/patent/US2570182A/en.


[13] Office of Technical Services. “Apparel.” Bibliography of Technical Reports 17, no. 4 (April 11, 1952): 125. Digitized by Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/sim_government-reports-announcements-index_1952-04-11_17_4_0.


[14] “Warm Feet,” New York Times, October 28, 1953, N1, digitized by Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/sim_new-york-times_1953-10-28_103_34976.


[15] American Alpine Club Safety Committee, Accidents in American Mountaineering (New York: American Alpine Club, 1954), 29, URL.


[16] U.S. Naval Medical School, Department of Cold Weather Medicine, Polar Manual (Bethesda, MD: National Naval Medical Center, 1961), 35, URL.


[17] Colin Fletcher, The Complete Walker: The Joys and Techniques of Hiking and Backpacking (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1968), 174–75, URL.


[18] "How to Buy a Trail Bed," Backpacker, June 1977, 66.


[19] Andrew Harvard and Todd Thompson, Mountain of Storms: The American Expeditions to Dhaulagiri, 1969 & 1973 (New York: Chelsea House, 1974), 205, https://archive.org/details/mountainofstorms0000harv.


[20] Summit, vol. 12–13 (1966), 32, URL.

[21] James J. Beveridge, "The Best in Sleeping Bags and Tents for the Backpacker," Field & Stream, April 1972, 92, URL.


[22] Encyclopedia of American Biography, “Stein, Leo,” (New York: American Historical Company, 1963), 477, URL.


[23] Cascade Designs. “Thermarest - Our History.” Therm-a-Rest. Accessed September 2, 2026. https://cascadedesigns.com/pages/thermarest-our-history.


[24] Ibid.


[25] Halfway Anywhere, Therm-a-Rest Z Lite Sol review


[26] Erps, Keith. “Which Side Is ‘Up’ on a Z Lite & Other Burning Questions.” Therm-a-Rest Blog. Cascade Designs, July 31, 2024. https://cascadedesigns.com/blogs/thermarest-gear/which-side-is-up-on-a-zlite.


[27] Therm-a-Rest Team. “50 Years of Better Sleep.” Therm-a-Rest Blog. Cascade Designs, January 4, 2022. https://cascadedesigns.com/blogs/thermarest-stories/50-years-of-better-sleep.


[28] National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “Reflecting on Space Benefits: A Shining Example.” NASA Spinoff. NASA, 2006. https://spinoff.nasa.gov/Spinoff2006/ch_9.html.


[29] Wikipedia, s.v. “Mylar.” Last modified July 27, 2026, 19:41. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BoPET.

Papering the Wilderness: How Permits Redefined the American Backcountry

 

 "The simplest rule of conduct for a camper is to leave a place as he would like to find it.” -Benton McKay 1887

I first visited the island of Kauai in college and learned about Nā Pali Coast State Park. I vowed to myself I'd return one day. Thirteen years later, I finally got my chance. I spent hours online reading everything I could about the park, the trail, and backpacking there. That's how I learned two things: reservations open exactly 90 days ahead of time, and competition for them is brutal. So, on the first night I was eligible, I logged in around 12:10 a.m. and went for a permit. Gone. The next night, I tried again right at midnight, but the site was so overloaded that by the time I actually got logged in, they were gone again. It's worth knowing that permits for this trail are only issued for about three months out of the year — which, it turns out, is exactly enough scarcity to make grown adults set alarms for midnight two nights in a row and still lose.

On the third night, I finally got smart and logged in at 11:45. I was running on fumes from two nights of sleep deprivation, but the second the countdown started, adrenaline took care of that problem for me. I sat there, fully alert, watching the clock hit midnight — and this time I sniped a permit right out from under someone else. Checked out by 12:03. A thirteen-year-old dream, secured in under three minutes flat.

When the trip finally arrived, Nā Pali Coast did not disappoint — it was even more beautiful than I'd built it up to be in my head. As it turns out, Kalalau Beach is remote enough that it tends to bring out a certain sense of freedom in people, and quite a few of my fellow campers were expressing that freedom topless, or otherwise not dressed at all. The one real drawback of the whole trip was that I'd brought my wife, and she wasn't too pleased.

There's a nostalgic bit of backpacking lore that goes something like: before the 1960s, entering the backcountry required nothing more than the will to "go." No permits, no lotteries, no app buzzing at midnight to tell you someone else won the Half Dome slot. Wherever the road ended, true "freedom" began.

For a certain slice of history, that's basically true: before the 1960s, there was no queue at a ranger station, no lottery to enter, no app to check the night before a trip. Hikers and campers moved through public land the way earlier generations had for a century — on foot, on faith, and on their own judgment about where to make camp. A trailhead was simply where the road ended and the woods began.

Treat that as a universal truth about wilderness, though, and you've bought into a bit of a myth. Humans have been gatekeeping wild land since roughly forever. Egyptian pharaohs kept private hunting reserves four thousand years ago, an institution that would go on to show up, in one form or another, across nearly every major civilization from Persia to Rome to imperial China.[1] Medieval European kings formalized their own version of it as Forest Law, carving out royal hunting grounds where a commoner caught poaching so much as a rabbit could face fines steep enough to ruin them, or worse.[2] And plenty of Indigenous nations in North America expected travelers crossing their territory to state their business and hand over a gift or toll before passing through — a custom well documented among the French fur traders who had to learn it fast or turn back.[3] "Just go" has mostly been the exception, not the rule, throughout history. The 1960s didn't invent gatekeeping; they just gave it a filing cabinet.

That freedom was never evenly distributed even within its own narrow American window. "Nothing more than the will to go" was true if you were white. It was not true if you were Black, for whom access to the outdoors was shaped by law and custom as much as by geography. Some national forests and state parks in the South ran openly segregated recreation areas — separate, and predictably worse, campgrounds, picnic grounds, and swimming holes — well into the twentieth century. Shenandoah National Park's Lewis Mountain, built in 1939 specifically for Black visitors while the rest of the park was reserved for whites, is one of the better-documented examples of a pattern that stretched across federal and state land throughout the segregated South.[4]

Beyond the formal rules, there was the blunter risk of simply being a Black traveler in a rural or unfamiliar place at all. The same instinct that produced the Negro Motorist Green Book — a guide to where you could safely sleep or fill up the tank — applied double to remote backcountry, where sundown towns and the threat of racial violence made stopping the car and walking into the woods dangerous in a way it never was for a white hiker.[5] Formal desegregation of federal recreation sites arrived gradually through the 1950s and '60s, but the chilling effect outlasted the legal signs coming down; a lack of visible precedent and felt welcome kept many Black Americans out of spaces that were, on paper, finally open. So the "will to go" story comes with an asterisk: for a lot of the country, permission was already the operating condition, just enforced by custom and violence instead of a permit desk.

 
None of this means the land ran totally untended, either. The Forest Service and National Park Service had existed since the early twentieth century, building roads, fighting fires, and stationing rangers at the gates. But managing land isn't the same as managing people. Rangers counted trees, watched for smoke, and stocked trout — they weren't counting backpackers or assigning you a specific patch of lakeshore. Access was a given. How crowded your campsite felt, how trampled the meadow was, came down to chance, and to the happy accident that not that many people wanted to walk that far from a parking lot. While that was true for federally controlled land like National Parks, some State lands did require camping permits (see 1946 example from New York to right).

That accident stopped holding by the 1960s. Cars got more reliable, highways pushed deeper into the mountains, and a postwar generation with money, time, and a shiny new external-frame pack discovered that backpacking could be a hobby instead of a chore. (If you're curious what actually pulls people out into the woods in the first place, we get into it over in Why Do People Go Camping?) The same decade that gave us Earth Day and the modern environmental movement also gave us, for the first time, actual crowds in places that had never seen one — and crowding is exactly what finally got agencies asking who was allowed to go where, and when.

Campfire Permits Before the 1960s

Here's a wrinkle nobody puts on the trailhead sign: campfire permits already existed before the 1960s, and they worked nothing like the permits the rest of this essay is about. Long before anyone needed a wilderness permit just to sleep somewhere, plenty of national forests already required a permit — albeit free — to build an open fire outside a developed campground or picnic area. Stick to the improved sites and you needed nothing. Wander off to build your own fire ring, though, and a quick stop at the ranger station was in order. That basic structure hasn't changed much: the free California Campfire Permit still works on exactly this "outside a developed site" logic today.[6]

 
That "free" part is the whole story, honestly. A campfire permit was never a rationing device the way a 1970s wilderness permit would become. It didn't cap how many people could be in an area at once, it wasn't handed out by lottery, and it didn't ration a limited supply of anything — everyone who asked, got one. What it regulated wasn't "how many" people showed up, but "what they did" once they were there: where you could build a fire (a cleared spot, not a pile of dry duff), and, eventually, what you'd better have on hand in case it got away from you — the shovel-and-bucket-of-water rule that still shows up on every fire permit today. Less a gate on entry, more a signed promise not to burn the place down. (see 1929 example from California to right)

It's also worth noting who this rule applied to, because the answer is: everyone, equally, which was rare enough to be notable. The trigger for needing a permit was leaving a designated site — not how you got there. A family who'd driven up in a Model T and wanted a campfire down some dirt spur needed the exact same permit as a hiker doing the same thing on foot. This wasn't a niche problem, either — the 1920s brought a full-blown boom in automobile "motor camping," with visitor numbers at national forest campgrounds climbing past a million annually by 1922, finally pushing Congress that same year to fund campground improvements for the first time to deal with the litter, sanitation, and fire risk all those bumper-to-bumper campers were generating.[7] (That whole car-centric side of backpacking history — the idea that your trip really starts at a gas station, not a trailhead — gets its own treatment in The Hidden Landscape of Backpacking) But the fire-permit rule itself never played favorites between the car camper and the backpacker. A parking spot didn't exempt you, and neither did showing up on foot get you off easier.

Seen this way, the campfire permit is less an ancestor of the modern wilderness permit than a distant cousin who happens to share the family name. One controlled fire. The other, decades later, would come to control people — how many, in which places, on which weekends. The old system's existence complicates any tidy story about pre-1960s freedom, but the contrast between the two is the useful part: it took the environmental and crowding pressures of the '60s and '70s to push agencies from regulating one specific hazardous activity to regulating the mere presence of people — from "here's how you may build a fire" to "here's whether you may come at all."

The Shift to Regulation

The legal foundation for everything that followed was the Wilderness Act of 1964, which created the National Wilderness Preservation System and put millions of acres under a mandate to preserve "outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation."[8] Read that phrase twice, because it contains the seed of every permit system that came after it: solitude isn't something you can hand out to everyone at once. If a law requires an area to offer solitude, and enough people show up wanting some, the only way to keep the promise is to cap how many people are there at a time. The Wilderness Act didn't invent rationing — it just handed agencies the legal cover to start doing it.

They wasted no time. The Boundary Waters Canoe Area in Minnesota, one of the busiest and most fragile wilderness landscapes in the country, moved toward permit requirements as canoe traffic surged in the years following the Act; a formal quota system for entry points followed and has been fine-tuned ever since — permits are now allocated every January on a first-come, first-served basis through Recreation.gov, with a daily cap at each entry point.[9] California's national parks moved on a similar timeline: Sequoia and Kings Canyon imposed daily use quotas on popular routes starting in 1972, then extended a full permit-and-quota system parkwide by 1974, with Yellowstone and Rocky Mountain National Park tightening their own backcountry systems around the same stretch of the decade.[10] In under a decade, the whole default assumption flipped — from "you may go unless told otherwise" to "you may go once you've been told you may."
What started as simple headcounts — a ranger jotting down who was headed where, mostly for search-and-rescue purposes — hardened over time into strict numerical quotas doing genuine ecological work: protecting alpine tundra that takes decades to recover from one bad trampled season, keeping water quality intact in heavily used drainages, and easing pressure on wildlife that gets a little too comfortable with human snacks. A permit stopped being just a record of your trip. It became a rationing device, and the number issued turned into, essentially, a policy decision about how much human damage a landscape could absorb before it stopped feeling wild.

The Digital Transformation

For decades this system ran on paper — a logbook at a ranger station, a trailhead register, a mailed-in application weeks ahead of time. That started changing in the 2000s and picked up speed through the 2010s, as paper self-registration and ranger-station lines gave way to centralized platforms, chief among them Recreation.gov, which now handles reservations and permits for a huge chunk of federal recreation sites. Interestingly, Recreation.gov was not the first website for federal land reservations. That honor goes to ReserveUSA.com which went live in 1999 with the tagline "Reserve your place under the stars" (see photo to right for an example of how the site looked in 1999). Recreation.gov replaced this earlier site by 2007 and effectively killed mail-in and in-person reservations however a phone line is still operational but sees less use than past decades. Today, the vast majority of reservations are made through the website or mobile app (see photo at top of page).

The digital shift did more than swap paper for pixels; it changed what access felt like. High-demand permits — for places like Half Dome, the Enchantments, or specific Boundary Waters entry points — now go through competitive lotteries months out, with Yosemite's own Half Dome lottery running every March and cutting a roughly 50/50 shot at a permit down closer to a coin flip most years.[11] A backpacking trip can be won or lost before you've even bought new socks. Access became something you applied for and were selected into, rather than something you simply took.

The Stacking of Permits

What started as a single permit for backcountry camping has, in the system's busiest corners, multiplied into a small bureaucracy of its own. In the most in-demand landscapes, a single trip can require three or four separate permissions stacked on top of each other like a very unfun layer cake.

Take a hike in Yosemite National Park that includes the cables up Half Dome. You might need: a wilderness permit to camp overnight in the backcountry; a separate Half Dome cable permit, awarded only through a lottery most applicants lose; a park entrance reservation if you're arriving during peak hours; and, without an annual pass, the standard entrance fee on top of all of it. Four distinct approvals, four separate windows to apply in, four separate ways for the whole plan to fall apart before you've laced a boot.

 

Great Smoky Mountains National Park offers a different, and honestly more amusing, version of the same problem — because the park was founded on an explicit promise. In 1951, Tennessee transferred two of the park's primary roads to the federal government with a deed restriction barring tolls on them "for all time," and the park has kept that word: it's still the only national park with no entrance fee.[12] And yet in March 2023, it rolled out its "Park it Forward" program, requiring a paid parking tag — $5 a day, $15 a week, $40 a year — for any vehicle parked longer than fifteen minutes anywhere in the park.[13] Overnight backcountry hikers still need a standard backcountry permit, and anglers need a state fishing license. In Tennessee that fishing license fee is among the highest in the country. Technically, nobody pays to “enter” the Smokies. Functionally, almost nobody who stops to actually hike gets out without paying something. The letter of the promise survives; the spirit is having a rough time of it. (see 2026 backcountry permit delivered via email from the Great Smoky Mountains to right)

The Geography of Where People Choose to Go

Part of what drives all this — the lotteries, the stacked permits, the quotas tight enough to turn a weekend trip into a gamble — is a distinctly modern, and in some ways distinctly American, problem: it's no longer expensive or difficult to skip the nature closest to you in favor of the nature everyone else has already Instagrammed.

For most of human history, and most of American history specifically, outdoor leisure time was spent nearby, because it had to be. People fished the creek down the road, walked the woodlot at the edge of town, picnicked wherever a wagon (and later a short drive) could get them. Long-distance travel for its own sake was a luxury of the wealthy. That constraint, more than any grand design, kept pressure on the land roughly proportional to population — the crowds showed up where the people already lived.

Cheap car travel broke that link, and cheap air travel finished the job. Once a family could drive a reliable car a few hundred miles on a tank of gas, or fly across the country for a few hundred bucks, the math changed: why spend a weekend at the unglamorous state forest twenty minutes away when Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, or Yellowstone was only a day's drive or a short flight further out? What had been a rich person's option became, over the twentieth century, something the rest of us could reasonably do too.

Stack a century of relentless marketing on top of that affordability and you get the current mess. National parks have been photographed, filmed, and celebrated as "the" American landscape almost since they were founded — Ansel Adams's Yosemite, the railroad companies building grand lodges to lure tourists to Yellowstone and Glacier, decades of postcards and calendars and now Instagram, all quietly training generations of Americans to think "nature" means a short list of famous proper nouns rather than whatever's out the back door. A place doesn't just need to be beautiful to draw a crowd anymore; it needs to be famous, and the parks have spent a hundred years cornering the market on famous.

The result is a strange geographic mismatch. Millions of people drive right past enormous amounts of genuinely great, underused land — state forests, regional parks, county land — to converge on a small handful of nationally famous destinations, which then buckle under exactly the concentrated pressure permits and quotas exist to manage. Meanwhile land that's often just as scenic, and sometimes ecologically richer for being less trampled, sits quiet, underfunded, and never once mentioned in the same breath as the "must-see" parks. The crowding crisis at Zion or the Smokies isn't really a story about too many people wanting wilderness; it's a story about too many people wanting the "same" wilderness, while a perfectly good alternative two hours away goes unused.

That mismatch has a racial dimension too, one that predates permits entirely. Decades of exclusion, formal and informal, left lasting gaps in who grew up camping, who has family memory of a national park trip, and who sees the backcountry as a place that's "for them" — gaps outdoor-participation research still finds today, long after the legal barriers came down. A permit lottery is blind to that history, but the demand it's rationing was never distributed evenly to begin with.

This matters for the permit debate because it reframes part of the problem as a demand-distribution problem rather than a pure carrying-capacity one. A lottery manages who gets into an already-oversubscribed park; it does nothing to explain why that park is oversubscribed while a comparable landscape two hours away isn't. Some of the fixes floated below — pricing, membership models, or just better marketing for the parks nobody's heard of — are at least partly aimed at that root imbalance: spreading demand out, instead of only rationing it at the single most crowded pinch point.

Does Regulation Become Overreach?

These layered systems raise a real question, and it isn't a rhetorical one: at what point do permits and passes stop being stewardship and start being an obstacle course that changes what wilderness is? The case for the current system is straightforward, and in narrow ecological terms, hard to argue with. Alpine soil and vegetation recover slowly, if ever, from repeated trampling. Water sources get fouled by concentrated human waste. Wildlife that gets used to backpacker snacks becomes a danger to itself and to people. Quotas cap the damage a landscape absorbs in a season, and permits make that cap enforceable. Proponents also point out that a permit system, whatever friction it adds, at least distributes access somewhat fairly — through a lottery or a first-come queue — rather than by whoever has the money or connections to just buy their way in.

But there's a competing case, and it comes from more than one direction. Some argue that private or trust-based stewardship — land held by conservation trusts or clubs with real financial and reputational skin in the game — would manage popular landscapes more nimbly than a bureaucracy answering to Congress and an annual budget fight. Instead of a flat numerical quota, land managers could lean on other tools: pricing that reflects actual scarcity, required club or association membership, or legal instruments like waivers and use contracts that shift liability onto the visitor instead of the agency. At the far end of this argument sits the "freedom-to-roam" model used in Scandinavia — "allemansrätten" in Sweden, formalized in the country's constitution — where walkers hold a right to cross nearly all land, public or private, as long as they behave.[14] Advocates argue genuine self-regulation beats a lottery: people already avoid the obviously crowded trailhead on a Saturday without being told to, and a system built on that instinct — backed by strong social norms and clear rules of conduct rather than headcounts — could allocate access more organically than a permit ever could.

A third position sits somewhere between strict rationing and hands-off freedom-to-roam, and it argues for a different kind of restriction rather than simply more or less of one. A flat quota treats every visitor as an identical unit of impact, when in practice impact varies enormously with skill: someone who knows how to pick a durable campsite, bury waste properly, hang food to avoid habituating wildlife, and handle a basic emergency without triggering a search-and-rescue callout leaves a much lighter footprint than someone who doesn't. If that's true, requiring visitors to complete some baseline training — Leave No Trace technique, backcountry navigation, basic emergency response — before issuing a permit could let agencies safely raise the cap on total visitors, since per-visitor impact drops even as headcount climbs. Proponents point to hunting license systems, which have long required a safety course before granting access, as a working precedent. The trade-off is its own kind of friction — one more hoop, and a real barrier for anyone without the time or money to clear it — but supporters argue it's a more honest exchange than a lottery, since it ties access to demonstrated preparedness instead of luck.

There's also a more personal cost to the current system, easy to miss in a policy debate: for a lot of people today, a backcountry trip doesn't feel real — doesn't become something you plan meals around or invite friends into — until the permit is actually in hand. (And once you're actually planning those meals, it turns out backpacking food has its own weird, fascinating history — see Trail Grub for that rabbit hole.) The whole trip lives at the mercy of a lottery result. That quietly changes the relationship between a person and a landscape, from "I am going" to "I am hoping to be allowed to go," which is a small shift but not a trivial one.

Set against all of this is the darker case for why some restriction is probably unavoidable: the "tragedy of the commons", ecologist Garrett Hardin's well-known 1968 argument that a shared resource, open to everyone with no limits, gets overused precisely because no single visitor bears the full cost of their own impact.[15] Without permits, quotas, or some other limiting mechanism, popular wilderness doesn't stay wild — it gets loved to death: a parking lot, a spiderweb of braided social trails, a lake with a bathtub ring where the shoreline used to be. Zero restriction has its own body count, ecological and sometimes human.

So, can wilderness get so thoroughly regulated — so mediated by lotteries, reservation windows, and stacked permits — that it stops being wild in any meaningful sense, even while it remains, on paper, perfectly protected? I don't have a tidy answer. What I have is a stamped permit from a very small window in 2023, a decade-old dream finally checked off, and a spouse who has since informed me, in no uncertain terms, that I will be doing my own research on beach etiquette before booking the next one.


By David F. Garner

For Further Reading:

The History of Backpacking Coffee Gear

The Man Who Bet Everything on a Gasoline Lamp

A Titillating Tale of Trail Hydration

Readers who want to go deeper into this tension — between access and protection, public stewardship and private alternatives — might enjoy Steven Davis's In Defense of Public Lands and Andro Linklater's Owning the Earth, both of which dig directly into the history and philosophy of who gets to control, and cross, the land.

 

 

Sources

1. "Royal hunt," Wikipedia, accessed 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_hunt.


2. "Medieval hunting," Wikipedia, accessed 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_hunting; see also "How hunting helped shape elite society," MIT News, September 10, 2020, https://news.mit.edu/2020/manner-of-franks-book-hunting-0910.


3. "Fur Trade," Virtual Museum of New France, Canadian Museum of History, https://www.historymuseum.ca/virtual-museum-of-new-france/economic-activities/fur-trade/.


4. "The Little-Known History of a Segregated Campground," Atlas Obscura, https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/shenandoah-segregated-campground; "Shenandoah National Park Is Confronting Its History of Segregation," Outside, May 12, 2022, https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/hiking-and-backpacking/shenandoah-national-park-segregation-history/.


5. "The Negro Motorist Green Book (1936–1964)," BlackPast.org, July 30, 2014, https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/negro-motorist-green-book-1936-1964/.


6. "Campfire Permits," Eldorado National Forest, USDA Forest Service, https://www.fs.usda.gov/r05/eldorado/permits/campfire-permits.


7. "May 11, 1922: US Forest Service heeds call of nature," Forest History Society, https://foresthistory.org/may-11-1922-us-forest-service-heeds-call-of-nature/.


8. The Wilderness Act of 1964, Public Law 88-577, full text, Wilderness.net, https://wilderness.net/practitioners/law/wilderness-act/.


9. "Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness Permits," Superior National Forest, USDA Forest Service, https://www.fs.usda.gov/r09/superior/passes/boundary-waters-canoe-area-wilderness-permits.


10. Lary M. Dilsaver and William C. Tweed, "Challenge of the Big Trees," National Park Service online book, chapter 9, https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/dilsaver-tweed/chap9f.htm.


11. "Half Dome Permits, Yosemite National Park," Recreation.gov, https://www.recreation.gov/permits/234652.


12. "A Simple Guide to Smoky Mountain Parking Passes, Park it Forward," TheSmokies.com, https://www.thesmokies.com/smoky-mountain-parking/.


13. "Park announces 2023 fee program changes," Great Smoky Mountains National Park, National Park Service, https://home.nps.gov/grsm/learn/news/park-announces-2023-fee-program-changes.htm/index.htm.


14. "Allemansrätten – Sweden's right of public access," Visit Sweden, https://visitsweden.com/what-to-do/nature-outdoors/nature/sustainable-and-rural-tourism/the-right-of-public-access/.


15. Garrett Hardin, "The Tragedy of the Commons," Science 162, no. 3859 (1968): 1243–1248.