Camping is fun for everyone, but one or two obnoxious campers can ruin the experience for everybody. However, this isn’t always due to malicious intent. Sometimes, campers can be breaking rules that can hinder other people’s overall experience without even knowing it. At all campgrounds, there are a certain unwritten rules that stand as basic campground etiquette that ensures the most positive experience for everyone involved.
1. Don’t Cut Through Other’s Campsites
Every person’s site is their own personal space, and nothing is worse than people getting into your personal space. Much like cutting through someone else’s lawn at their home, campground spots should be treated with that same respect. Also, you never know what they’ve left on the ground in their site, so if you end up breaking something of theirs while cutting through their site, the person at the site can legally shoot you (not actually, we’re just being dramatic, please don’t harm each other). Many campers also travel with their dogs, and dogs don’t always like strangers. Plus, campers don’t always pick up after their dogs right away, so you could step in something icky and unexpected.
Ultimately, it boils down to being courteous of your fellow campers, which will tend to be a recurring theme of this blog post. Treat the your fellow adventurers the way you’d like them to treat you, and everyone can experience the beauty of nature without anger.
2. Keep Your Volume Reasonable
Lots of people use their vacation time to escape the noise of the city and their stressful lives, so they want their camping stay to be as relaxing as humanly possible. Therefore, they don’t want to have loud talking, music or vehicles completely throw them off their groove. There are a few different steps you can follow to make sure that no one will be disturbed by noise.
- Leave Your Instruments at Home and Your Speakers Low- We know some nice folk music around a campfire at night sounds like the perfect scenario, but not everyone around you will agree. It’s hard to keep guitars at a lower volume, so just save that for a different trip. The same goes with speakers to an extent, but it’s easier to keep those quieter.
- Keep Voices and Chitter Chatter to an “Inside Voice”- Similar to keeping your music at a reasonable volume, it’s important to make sure your voice is kept reasonable as well. Sometimes, it can be easy to lose track of how loud your voice is, but please be mindful of other campers while you’re talking to your family and friends.
- Don’t Honk Your Car Horn- We don’t know why you’d do this at the campground, but we’ve seen crazier things happen. Even if you need to get someone’s attention, honking a horn is probably the worst approach.
3. Keep Your Dogs Contained and Clean
Even though pretty much every citizen of Montana loves dogs, it’s important that your dog doesn’t go snooping around (pun intended). There have been stories of dogs getting into coolers, pooping in tents, and occasionally getting scared to the point of harming its newfound adversary. Because of this, you should always keep your dog on a leash or contained in our handy-dandy dog park (see right).
As cute as dogs are, what comes out of their backsides isn’t. So, along with keeping your dogs contained, it’s equally (if not more) important to clean up after your dogs. We mentioned earlier how gross it is to step in dog poop, and nobody wants to experience that. So, please clean up after your dogs. Lots of campgrounds even offer doggie bags that you can carry around with you in case of emergency.
4. Be Considerate With Your Lights
Much like volume, the various lights around you can ruin other people’s relaxation. Some people like to go to bed early so they can get up before the sun comes up, and some people like to stay up until the AM so they can sleep until noon. Regardless of your preferences, some unwanted light can really throw a wrench into things, and both demographics can cause these problems. There are many types of light pollution, so there are a few tips to save everyone a little bit of headache
- Be Conscious of Indoor & Outdoor Lights – While a small, dimmer light on the outside of an RV is safe, and sometimes essential, brighter lights such as headlights or spotlights are more than a little unnecessary. If you aren’t driving your vehicle, there shouldn’t be any reason to have your headlights on, and there shouldn’t really be any reason to bring a large spotlight with you on a camping trip, but we’ve seen some wild things.
- Always Bring a Flashlight – We understand that everyone needs to walk around for one reason or another when it’s dark outside. However, to properly navigate outside, you don’t always need something extravagant, so a flashlight is a perfect way to go. It’s easy to pack, bright enough so you don’t walk into a tree, and dim enough so you won’t disturb your neighbors.
- Campfires – Being a campground, we’ve seen some impressively large campfires. Just know there’s a time and a place for things like that. If it’s a slower night and there are a couple of vacancies around you, then you build that campfire as large as you want (while keeping it safe), but if it’s a busier time at the campground, you need to keep it reasonable and personal. Plus, we don’t want you smoking other people out or accidentally burning down a tree.
5. Make Sure Your Gear is Secured
Everyone loves going on an adventure, and most adventures need a variety of equipment to ensure the effectiveness and safety of the journey. While some of that gear may be easy and packable, that isn’t always the case, so it needs to be secured. The weather doesn’t always cooperate, so sometimes a storm could come, *ahem*, storming through and send your valuable travel gear all willy-nilly. You also never know if someone could see something they like, and get sudden klepto-driven urges for your items. So if everything is well-secured down, neither of these scenarios are likely to happen.
That being said, keep your stuff secured reasonably. It’s quite an eye sore if all of someone’s equipment is strewn out and about. So please don’t make your campsite look like a tiny tornado made its way through your gear.
6. Keep Your Rugs Off the Grass
To ensure the beauty and longevity of the campsites, please don’t put rugs on the grass. Every year, we have large patches of grass die by the time a camper leaves their spot because of them putting rugs on top for a elongated period of time. Nothing is worse than showing up to a campsite that has a huge patch of dry grass, so it ultimately boils down to trying to leave the campsite better than it looked when you got there.
We look forward to seeing you and hearing about your awesome Montana adventures!