Definitions: or what the He!! do they think they are doing?

[Mortblanc]

During this recovery period I have been watching a lot of bush-craft, hiking and woodcraft videos. It has shocked me at the free use of some of the traditional terms I have seen of late.

Now do not think I am picking on British outdoorsmen. This is a generalized observation and includes those from the Philippines, India and Malaysia also.

Stealth camping is one. If you sneak onto someone's property and set a tent up in the middle of a field you are not stealth camping. Especially if you can be seen from the roadway, from the farmer's house, on CCTV, or light up a big honking bonfire that blazes five feet high.

When you do that you are simply waiting beside a tent for the constables to come collect you. Shouting about the injustice of society and expressing contempt for the landowners and calling the police their lackeys is not appropriate at that point, especially when you dropped a good 2K pounds for your "stealth camping gear" and drove up in a 20k pound vehicle.

Wild camping is next. Getting drunk at the pub and passing out in the ditch is not "wild camping".

You are not wild camping if your vehicle is in a car park less than 100 yards from the tent. You might as well be in your back garden. Just because you are in a tent does not make it wild camping. A tarp does not make it wild camping. An exception might be if you were on a 4WD or bike expedition into remote territory. I would view that as legitimate wild camping. Packing your gear in on a horse, llama or camel also counts.

Packing into rough country out of sight and sound of the traffic and vehicles and not seeing a house or person anywhere for miles around is wild camping. One must actually be in the wild to be wild camping. If I can hear the traffic passing by your camp on the You tube video it is not a "wild camp"!

OK, now about backpacking. Putting everything you own into a big sack and toting it down the road is not backpacking. Over here in the states road miles do not count as miles traveled on most of the sanctioned trails.

If there is a village every three miles along your paved highway route you are not backpacking. If you stop at a tea shop for a break you are not backpacking! If you walked for 40 miles, took four days had three hot showers and 6 pub meals and never stepped on dirt you are not backpacking, especially if you never opened the pack except to get at you clean clothes, and you have a clean outfit for each day.

I have seen several videos where I could not for the life of me figure why the person was displaying their kit at the start and toting the 30 kilo sack of "necessities" when they were sleeping in a B&B nightly and eating at the local cafes!

Now referring to the before mentioned road miles. If one is driving down a gravel or graded and pressed stone roadway or tended dirt path from one destination to another that is constantly in use one is not "off road". One is simply not on a paved road. I grew up living on one of those gravel paths through the woods. Have lived on several since then and if the government does not do something about the road I live on very soon I will wind up residing on another. I had an address that stated I lived on a road. Therefore it was impossible to drive past my house while "off roading".

Be it motorbike or 4 wheeled vehicle the rule stays the same. If it is a defined track that is groomed, graded and maintained or if it is identified and named on a map, it is not an "off road" experience. Those graveled, cobbled, graded tracks were not to long ago the "main roads" and they are certainly not "Off Road", even if you did get your Range Rover muddy when you went down them. Those were puddles, not mud bogs.

I am also surprised that there are any you-tube bush-crafters with any fingers and toes left. I never saw such atrocious knife and ax skills. (Did you know that when I spell AXE (that is the American spelling) on your site it tags as mis-spelled").

I also never saw so many people carrying meat in a pack in 30c weather so they can cook a steak for the evening of the second day. Do you suppose they might be cheating and have a support car with an icebox along?

OK, rant over. My supper is cooked and I must go. I am having one of those meals you people do not eat called "meat loaf". Ground beef and spices al mixed up and covered with sauce and baked. Good stuff!

[Midnitemo]

In fairness I haven't seen these videos but i will say the UK is tiny with a very large population density , i am quite lucky to live on the North Wales border making a getaway into the boonies quite easy but even in Wales you are nearly always on somebodies private property or public land covered by a raft of bye laws , i take your point that there are some dreamers posting and bigging their skills and experiences up

[Midnitemo]

Just looked up the densities UK 708 people for every square mile, USA 87 people for every square mile , in the UK if you draw a line coast to coast passing through Preston then to the North of that line is a fair quantity of wilderness , most of Wales is good too , Devon and Cornwall are pretty good out of high season but the minute the Sun shines then getting away from the masses gets a lot more difficult , then there is the issue of getting there , in the UK if you leave a vehicle unattended in the country for any length of time (more than a day) then it probably won't be there when you return , usually towed , wrecked or stolen, getting away from it all is a far tougher proposition than you might think here in the UK.

[Mortblanc]

Yes, I used to argue with NR about the population density thing.

He was waiting for the 90% die off and the return of the island wilderness and I was telling him that at his 90% kill off the population density would be exactly what it is in my area right now, and this is not a wilderness! Rural yes, wilderness no.

But people get confused with the population density thing. We have areas as densly populated as anything GB has to offer. However, we have several states out west that are impossible to support a population of any kind. There are simply not enough resources to sustain an economy and those states will have population densities of 10-25 psm.

You can not run there to live free and escape the rat race unless you are already wealthy and do not need to earn an income.

On top of that those states get about 4-8 inches of rain annually. Imagine that, 4-8 inches of rain each year eternally. and it has been like that sine the last ice age, no global warming causing it. That is not a drought, it is the norm. You can not even grow weeds on that land, and it makes up half the area of the U.S.

That is also why had the U.S. catches fire and burns each year!

[Skean Dhude]

I agree with MNM. With NR though where he lives if there was a 90% die off he wouldn't be too bad. There are only a few high density areas where he lives. Most of the population of the UK is in half a dozen massive cities, massive by UK terms anyway, and they have absolutely no way to sustain themselves in those cities. They rely on food being transported to them via fleets of trucks and energy being fed to them from power stations out in the sticks. There are very few places in the UK that you can go to and camp out foc and not one anything like the big parks in the US. Unless you go to the outer reaches of Scotland you will always be with a few miles of some sort of shop or someones house.

[CharlesHarris]

West Virginia, has an average population density of 77 persons per square mile or 29.8 per square kilometer. West Virginia is one of the few US states not to have a city with more than 100,000 residents. In fact, the largest city in the state, Charleston (the state capital) is home to just 49,736 people. The next largest cities are Huntington (48,638) and Parkersburg (30.991).

The majority of West Virginia's counties are designated as rural, with a small majority of the state's population living in a rural area. In 2010, the state had a 51% rural population, compared to 49% urban.

The most populated counties in West Virginia are Kanawha and Berkeley, with respective populations of 183,293 and 114,920.

Source: http://worldpopulationreview.com/states/...opulation/

Berkeley County, is no longer rural east of I81, but is really a suburb within the commuting radius to Washington, DC, having a density of 236 per square mile.

The western edge of Berkeley county along the Allegheny front, where I live, is more rural, resembling adjacent Morgan county, which has 65 persons per square mile. The isolated, rugged, mountainous counties are sparcely populated, Pocahontas County has only 9.5 persons per square mile.

[Pete Grey]

As a comparison I live in an area with a population of 6500 to the square mile, and the area has plenty of open space, most of the high rise flats have long gone and we are surrounded by fields .

[Pete Grey]

Just read MBs first post again.......just for fun.

Well done pal, it’s what we call a cracker

[Ysbryd]

It's funny because it's true, especially the point made about conflicts between "stealth campers" and land owners.
As a land owner I would just like to point out that if only people ask first I will gladly show them some really private camp sites including dead wood as fuel and clean streams. The people I object to are the type that turn up and can't wait to try out a brand new Gränfors Bruk axe on one of the trees that I have personally planted during my stewardship of the place. Don't these idiots realise that wood needs to season before it burns cleanly?

[Mortblanc]

I was watching a video just yesterday where the subjects were carrying heavily laden packs (apparently British you-tubers have never heard of lightweight modern gear) for miles across the desolate wilderness of Yorkshire.

They huffed and puffed uphill and down, searched hours for a campsite and finally settled on a scrubby hillside on a 45% slope, set up camp and began "processing" firewood with enough tools to build a small town.

Off in the background you could see a little old gray haired lady in her mac and wellies walking her Yorkie.