Twelve New Things

An adventure challenge for 2025

Don’t call it a New Year’s resolution! Like the myriad reading challenges meant to help people read a more diverse assortment of books, I’m attempting to stretch my outdoorsy comfort zone in the upcoming year with my own personalized adventure challenge.

Sometimes I just need a little push. When I started solo backpacking, I told myself I would never backpack alone where there are black bears. Then I relented a bit and decided I would go solo in bear country, but only if there were bear boxes or poles for my food bag. Eventually, that also felt limiting, so I threw my self-imposed restrictions out the window.¹ Each step leads to something bigger.

I’ve compiled twelve outdoor (or outdoor-adjacent) activities that I thought about doing at some point in the past year, but just…didn’t. Either I was uncertain of my abilities or didn’t make time in my schedule or couldn’t convince a friend to join me. But who knows, maybe taking the small steps on this list will bring me to a future adventure that I can’t even fathom right now.

What outdoor activities do you want to try in the upcoming year? I’d love to hear about them in the comments!

Here are mine:

Stay at a campground that doesn’t take reservations

I’ve written an entire post about my reluctance to stay at first come, first served (FCFS) campsites.² What if I drive a long way and there are no open sites? But reserving all my campsites ahead of time requires that I stick to a strict itinerary and that can mean missing out on wonderful side quests. I will allow myself to do as much research into possible camping spots ahead of time as I want, but I’m going to embrace flexibility and spend at least one night at a FCFS site.³

Sleep under the stars

You might be thinking, “Alice, don’t you go camping all the time? How is this something new?” And while I do camp, I always sleep in my tent with the rainfly on, so I never see the stars. After all, there could be a surprise thunderstorm overnight or I could make eye contact with an animal ambling past my tent! It feels safer to be separated from the outside world by a layer of silnylon. I’m not ready to cowboy camp⁴—waking up to bugs crawling on me is truly a nightmare—but I think I can spend a night outdoors without using my rainfly as a security blanket.

Read a book inspired by an interpretive sign or plaque at a park

I love a sign in a park. I will breeze past the crisp white placards in an art museum, but you cannot drag me away from a faded display about shipwrecks or lycopods. I think it’s the fear of missing something cool. After all, nature isn’t neatly organized into frames and display cases to show you where to look, so you have to read the interpretive materials. There’s so much that I don’t know and this year I want to dive in deeper.

Canoe camp for a weekend

I have really fond memories of canoeing with my parents on the Carmans River in the Wertheim National Wildlife Refuge. It was only about a fifteen minute drive from my childhood home in Bellport, NY, so it was fairly easy to spend a Saturday morning on the river, spotting herons along the shore and then splitting a box of Dutch Mill apple cider doughnuts.⁵ But these days I don’t have a paddling partner, so I rarely get on the water. The list of places I want to canoe camp has been growing ever since a woman on the dock at Isle Royale told me about the Sylvania Wilderness⁶, so this year—whether I can convince a friend to join me or whether I have to sign up for an organized group trip—I’m getting the canoe out of my parents’ garage and making a weekend trip happen.

Bring watercolors on a hike and paint a landscape

I haven’t taken an art class since middle school and it shows. However, I’m enamored with the idea of taking a break alongside a pretty lake and painting the scene. There are teeny tiny watercolor kits that talented artists bring on backpacking trips, but I’ll probably just complete this challenge on a day hike so I can bring along my cheap, bulky set without worrying about the extra ounces.

Learn to identify five new birds by sight and sound

This is such an incredibly low bar that some of you are probably thinking this is just a throwaway adventure to bulk up my list. But while I can identify some birds by sight and others by sound, the center of that Venn Diagram is pretty sparse. I’m almost 37, so I think it’s time I start making an effort to learn the common birds in my area rather than just texting my mom a haphazard description whenever I see or hear something cool.⁷

Run a 10k trail race

I’m not really a runner, but I enjoy an occasional trail race. It’s much better than plodding along on a treadmill at the gym or being squeezed by thirty thousand people at a themed fun run in downtown Chicago. I like the excuse to be out in nature, the snacks at the finish line, and the blind spots on the course that allow me to walk occasionally without well-meaning spectators urging me to go faster.

Although I’m completely confident in my ability to hike 20 or more miles in a day, I balk at running anything more than a 5k race—I’m scared of being the slowest person out there or failing to finish altogether. But a 10k is only a smidge over six miles and I wouldn’t think twice about that distance if I were hiking! My primary goal is to finish and my secondary goal is to not finish last.

Dehydrate my own food

I’ve gotten pretty adept at assembling my own backpacking meals using store bought ingredients, like freeze dried veggies, ramen, and parboiled rice. But the next level is to start with fresh ingredients and dehydrate them myself. Internet chefs claim it is possible to do with just an oven, so I will not be investing money and counter space into a dedicated food dehydrator for this adventure. Of all the twelve challenges, this is the one that I most expect to go awry.

Return to a trail that made me cry

My series about Type 2 Fun has outlined some of the places where I’ve shed a tear (or twenty) on trail. What better way to apply the lessons I’ve learned than to return to one of those trails and create a positive experience there? Three cheers for personal growth!

Try hammock camping

A few years ago, my sister gifted me a hammock set up and I’m embarrassed to admit that I haven’t used it yet. Honestly, I’m intimidated by hammock camping—how to tie the straps to the trees, how to choose which trees to use, how to pitch a tarp over the hammock. But I can’t learn those skills if I never take the hammock out of my closet!

Design a Dungeons & Dragons session tailored to a backpacking trip

This idea has been rattling around in my head since my first trip to Isle Royale in 2021, but be warned—the next paragraph is extremely nerdy.

Wouldn’t it be cool if I took the map of a park or trail and turned it into a D&D world? Every campsite, every point of interest, every trail junction would have an encounter planned for it, so I could physically walk through the landscape with the party I am DMing⁸ for. When we pass those locations, we would take a break from hiking and play through the encounter. Forget theatre of the mind, we are living in the game map!

I realize that actually organizing a group to pull this off would be a next level accomplishment, which is why my challenge is just to design the map and encounters. It never hurts to be prepared in case I can convince my nerdy backpacking friends that this would be fun!

Go on a solo night hike

Night hikes are awesome—turn off your headlamp and let your feet feel the trail! It was on a night hike at a volunteer trailbuilding project that I finally understood what full-bench tread construction⁹ should feel like to a hiker. But it’s one thing to head onto a dark trail with company and quite another to go alone. I don’t think I’m scared of the dark, so why am I so reticent to hike by myself after sunset? I suppose I’ll have plenty of time to ponder that question while I am completing this challenge!

As I complete these challenges throughout 2025, I will share recaps of my experiences. To find all the posts in this series, click the button below:

1. Still not interested in solo camping in grizzly country, though!

2.

3. I regularly stay at backpacking sites that don’t take reservations, but typically those spots encourage multiple groups to share the space, so long as there is room for an additional tent. This challenge is specifically about drive-in campgrounds where the expectation is that each campsite is for a single family or group.

4. Cowboy camping is sleeping outdoors without a shelter. It probably works better in places where there aren’t ticks and mosquitos.

5. Dutch Mill went out of business years ago, but I still think about those doughnuts. Almost all apple cider doughnuts these days are dipped in cinnamon sugar, but the Dutch Mill ones were glazed.

6. She described it as a “mini Boundary Waters” in the UP, just north of the Wisconsin border.

7. A few months ago, I was on the treadmill at the gym, staring out at the same boring piece of sidewalk when I noticed a bird. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew that it did not belong on this residential city street. To my novice eye, it was clearly a shorebird, but not one I recognized. A storm had passed through the day before so I thought it was likely the bird had been blown off course from wherever it actually wanted to be. I couldn’t find an exact match using the filters in my bird apps, so I ended up just texting my mom the description because she’s very talented at identification (though she always downplays her skills).

8. The Dungeon Master (or DM) is responsible for running the game for the other players at the table. The acronym for the person is commonly turned into a verb to describe what they do, so DMing is a shorthand for running the game.

9. The USFS has a diagram of what full bench construction should look like, but just go for a night hike and you’ll be able to feel where the backslope and critical edge begin by the slope of the trail: https://www.fs.usda.gov/t-d/pubs/htmlpubs/htm07232806/page08.htm