Sometimes pushing your boundaries can take the form of huge significant events. Often though, it’s a shifting of comfort zones that happens so gradually and incrementally that we don’t really notice it, and can easily take it for granted.

This sounds like I’m about to start talking about something really profound, but actually, I’m thinking about going camping.

A couple of days ago I decided to take a walk around Bannau Brycheiniog, with the plan of camping near Pen Y Fan and enjoying an early sunrise. A couple of years ago the thought of wandering into the seemingly vast national park on my own on a quiet Monday afternoon with a backpack and a tent for the night would have filled me with excitement, but also a good dose of fear and no short supply of anxiety.

Fast forward to today and it’s quite literally a walk in the park. A decent stint of walking and camping in remote bits of Scotland this year has left even the more sparsely populated bits of the South feeling… whatever the opposite of remote is.

This is a double edged sword. On the one hand, I feel massively more confident in my ability to spend time in tents in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, I have entirely recalibrated what ‘the middle of nowhere’ means to me.

When led in my little tent getting slapped about by some concerningly high winds I took huge comfort from the fact that I was next to the relative motorway of a well built surfaced path and seeing the lights of Brecon in the distance. A couple of years ago I’d have been quite scared in this situation. The tent will fail. What will I do? What am I doing?

Nowadays my comfort zone has shifted. Being so close to a surfaced path meant that the idea of abandoning camp overnight and walking out under the light of the head torch wasn’t so bad. Even in a worst case scenario, it felt like a safe place to be. There is phone signal.

What if the tent fails, I pack up camp at 3am, fall over in the dark, and break an ankle fumbling about in the wind? I’d get in the sleeping bag, into my emergency bivvy, eat some food, and curl up behind a rock until somebody passed by who could help me hobble down. Given the popularity of the area this wouldn’t be more than a few hours, or I could slowly make my own way down in daylight using my poles for support. This theoretical bad situation didn’t seem so bad at all compared to the reality of a similar situation in a place more remote, pathless, and devoid of phone signal.

So, I feel much more confident in bigger landscapes than I used to. I’ve discovered how much I love the feeling of remoteness and am going to have to go further to find more of it. In less remote areas I can now go for a wander and sleep in the tent alone with an enhanced feeling of safety, confidence, and competence. This feels like a nice ‘level up’ in outdoor experience. For all this talk of big scary remote scenes, I don’t always want to be scared shitless when I’m outside.

I hope anybody reading this who might like the idea of camping in nature but is anxious about sleeping out in the hills alone can be reassured that if you prepare well, consider the worst case scenarios, and get comfortable with them as possible realities, you can begin to free your mind from worrying and enjoy the experience.

As a little finishing point, just because somewhere has phone signal or isn’t a total remote wilderness doesn’t mean I’m suggesting Its risks shouldn’t be taken seriously. People can and do get hurt and die in ‘safe’ places.

Always carrying the things you need to keep you safe in an emergency is a big part of feeling comfortable. I always carry an emergency bivvy bag, torch, whistle, extra food, paper maps and a compass. The likelihood of needing these things is hopefully slim, but it’s better to be safe than sorry, and you never know who else you’ll stumble across out and about.

I recently read a story of a walker saving somebody’s life in the Lake District by putting them in an emergency bag and getting in it with them to keep them warm until mountain rescue arrived with a stretcher to get them back down the mountain. That £5, 300g emergency bag might save sombodies life, so if you’ve read this far maybe consider buying one and carrying it with you on your hiking and biking adventures.✌️