Hi all,

I'm looking to take some sort of backpacking trip this summer, and I want a challenge. I've never been on a backpacking trip before, but I will be 18 and am physically fit.

Any suggestions on location, duration, or just simple tips for a beginner to get started? Thanks!

Welcome!

The best place to start is short trips close to home. It's a good idea to start slow (a few short overnighters) and work up to more ambitious trips as you gain experience. More info on which part of the country you live in would help! It won't do much good for me to recommend hikes around Portland, Oregon if you live in Portland, Maine!

You might want to start by reading the articles on the home page of this site, left hand column. That will give you a lot of info about the gear you'll need and about some of the skills you'll need to learn.

You don't say if you've ever spent time camping or hiking before. The more you have camped and hiked in the past, the easier your transition to backpacking will be, because these activities have a large overlap with backpacking. If you are a complete newcomer to camping and hiking, this will require you to ramp up to backpacking rather more slowly.

You can pick up a lot of information by browsing extensively in the back pages of the Backcountry Beginners forum here. Backpacking is not an especially dangerous activity, but its dangers are almost all related to inexperience and at their extreme boundaries they are potentially fatal, so getting information about how to gain experience safely - and following it - are quite important to your learning how to backpack.