About Us

Last updated: 4 August 2026

Why this site exists

The first tent I ever slept in was borrowed from my uncle and it smelled like his garage. I pitched it in a shallow dip because the ground looked soft there, which is how I woke up at two in the morning lying in a puddle. I took an ill-advised shortcut through a stranger’s campsite and earned a look I can still feel between my shoulder blades. I spent half the weekend quietly googling “what is a vestibule.”

That was 2016. I came home mildly embarrassed and completely hooked. That’s the origin of CamperishTrails: one wonderful, slightly humbling weekend, and the discovery that everything hard about camping was learnable. Someone had just forgotten to write it down for people like me.

So, I started keeping notes. What the letter codes on the reservation page meant. Which borrowed gear I used, and which I carried around for two days for nothing. Why the inside of the tent was wet on a night it never rained. The notes were for me, until friends started planning first trips of their own and I found myself sending the same messages over and over. Arrive with daylight. Pitch it in the yard first. Bring two pens for the fee envelope; you’ll understand later.

The trip that changed everything

Three years in, the notes were still missing something, and I could not have told you what until a cold August night at Big Meadows, up on Skyline Drive in Shenandoah.

Nothing dangerous happened. It was 43 degrees, uncomfortable, and my husband and I had managed to spend money twice on things that still didn’t work. My sleeping bag was a 50°F Ozark Trail, which is a perfectly sensible bag for August at sea level but a poor one at three and a half thousand feet. We pitched on a slope twice and blamed the tent. Nobody had told us the simple things: that ~3500 feet in August still gets cold, and why the pad under you matters as much as the bag over you

So we went looking for something that would just explain it, and found either gear-obsessive writing aimed at ultralight thru-hikers counting grams, or advice so general it was useless. None of it showed us what a bad site actually looks, or what happens when you commit to one.

That gap is what this site is trying to fill.

Who we are

I’m Feroza Kashif. I’ve been camping since 2016 and RVing since 2019, and in 2026 my husband and I turned a decade of notes into CamperishTrails. He tests most of this alongside me and asks the questions I forget to answer, which is roughly how he ended up shaping half of what’s here.

Between us we’ve camped and RVed across a good deal of the country: BLM desert outside Quartzsite, Arizona; Fort Stevens on the Oregon coast; stretches at Fishing Bridge in Yellowstone, Colter Bay in Grand Teton, and Smokemont on the North Carolina side of the Smokies. Long enough to learn the quirks: that Fishing Bridge is the only campground in Yellowstone with full hookups and still won’t let you light a campfire; that Look Rock’s ten renovated sites hold the only electric-and-water hookups in the Smokies while everything else, Smokemont included, is dry; and that “45 feet” at Colter Bay means the rig and the truck combined. Rules do change, so treat anything specific here as true at the time we wrote it, and check before you go. We do.

The Word “Camperish”

You won’t find it in a dictionary, but you probably already know what it means.

Camperish is wanting the fire and the stars and the coffee outside, and getting stuck on everything standing in the doorway: jargon nobody defines, campgrounds that sell out in minutes, a gear wall that costs a month’s rent, and the quiet fear of being the person doing it wrong in public.

It is being almost a camper, which I’d guess covers most people. The “Trails” half is in our logo, if you go looking for it: a line of footprints wandering off past the tent. You don’t leap from the couch to the backcountry. You take small, slightly crooked steps, and the steps make a trail.

How we write things

Articles here are written on the assumption that nobody has explained this particular thing to you yet, and that you’re smart.

We try not to skip the step that turns out to be the one people get stuck on, and we try not to pad. Some things don’t survive being put into words. You can read three paragraphs about guyline angles, or about how a loaded pack should sit against your hips, and still have no idea whether yours is right. Those get infographic diagrams built around the mechanism itself.

We publish the failures too. The flooded tent spot, the fee station with no pen, the wrong Tuesday. Most guides photograph a good result in good light, which is a poor way to learn what going wrong looks like.

How we research

A site this broad covers more gear and more ground than any two people could have personally used, and there’s no honest way to pretend otherwise.

Some of it is ours: sites we’ve slept at, things that broke on us, mistakes we paid for twice. The rest comes from documentation and from people who know more than we do. Manufacturer instructions and safety literature. Published standards where they exist, including ISO 23537-1:2022 for sleeping bag temperature ratings and ASTM F3340-22 for sleeping pad R-values. Agencies including the National Park Service, US Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, US Army Corps of Engineers, and a number of state park systems.

When something is better checked with a person than a page, we check it with a person. Campground quirks and local rules, the details that never make it into the official listing, get fact-checked against the people who actually run the places: rangers, campground hosts and reservation office staff.

Who this is for

Mostly beginners, though that word is slipperier than it sounds. Plenty of people have camped for fifteen years in the same tent at the same lake and have never hung a hammock, towed anything, or packed for more than one night. Everybody is a beginner at the next thing.

Safety content

Some of what’s on this site can hurt you if it’s wrong: tent and RV heaters and carbon monoxide, propane, fire, sharp tools, RV electrical systems, water treatment, to name a few. For those articles we work from manufacturer instructions and published safety literature, we err toward caution, and we say where the line sits between a DIY job and a licensed professional. RV propane work and shore power wiring sit on the professional side of that line, and we will keep saying so.

No licensed professional reviews these articles before they publish. It is us, the manufacturer’s documentation and the published safety literature. Which is exactly why we would rather send you to a professional one time too many than one time too few. You’ll find precautions here. You won’t find medical or emergency instructions, and that’s deliberate – that’s a doctor’s lane.

None of this replaces the rules for the specific place you’re going. Fire bans, permit requirements and food storage regulations change constantly and vary by district. Check with the land manager before you go. The full legal position is set out in our Terms & Conditions.

Monetization

Right now, it isn’t any. For now, there are no ads, no affiliate links, no sponsored articles, and no manufacturer has paid for coverage or seen a draft before publication. Gear discussed here was bought, borrowed, or described from documentation. If that ever changes, we will update this section, and the disclosure goes at the top of the affected articles.

Corrections

We will get some things wrong. When that happens, we will fix the article. If you spot an error, tell us. Corrections on safety topics get priority, and we’ll take them from anyone.

Our Vision

Here’s the strange truth about this website: we succeed when you leave it.

Not to another tab — to a campground. Every metric that matters to us fits in one question: did the reader actually go? A guide that gets read twice but never camped from is a pretty failure. A guide that gets skimmed once, printed, and taken outside is the whole point of the enterprise.

Three things we’re building toward:

A first year of camping, fully mapped. Camping picked up gatekeeping it never needed, and we’d like to wear those walls down. The person googling in the store aisle deserves an ally, because we were in the same spot.

An outdoors with lower walls. Camping got wrapped in gatekeeping it never needed — vocabulary tests, gear-price admission fees, the smirk that greets honest questions. We’d like to help wear those walls down. The person googling in the store aisle deserves an ally, because we were in the same spot.

Guides worth printing. Evergreen, updated, specific enough to act on tonight.

If in a few years there are more slightly crooked footprint trails leading away from more first campsites because this site existed, that’s the win. Everything else is decoration.

Disclaimer

Everything on this site is either our own experience or something we researched as explained above. We write it to the best of our abilities, and we fix it when we learn better. It works for us. It may or may not work for you. Your campsite, your gear, your weather, your vehicle, and your body aren’t ours. Read what’s here, then use your own judgment, follow the manufacturer’s instructions for your own equipment, and check the current rules for wherever you’re going. Nothing on this site is professional advice.