You probably have a defensive plan for your house. You might have one for your vehicle, your office, and your kid’s school drop-off. Ask most concealed carriers what their plan is twenty miles off the nearest paved road, though, and you’ll get a shrug.
That’s the gap I want to close here.
Camping, hiking, and backpacking change the variables on you. The threats are different. The timelines before help arrives stretch out. The legal landscape shifts under your boots from one parcel of land to the next. And most of us mentally relax the second we get out of cell range — which is the real problem.
Riley Bowman and I sat down on the podcast a while back to walk through this topic, and the conversation covered enough ground that it deserved a written version. What follows is the cleaned-up version of that discussion — what to think about, what most people get wrong, and how I personally handle some of it.
Start With Where You’re Camping
The most underrated defensive decision you’ll make on a camping trip is the one before you’ve packed the car: where you’re going.
There’s a meaningful difference between a developed campground — ranger station, neighboring sites, dumpsters and a bathroom building within view — and dispersed camping where you drove until the road ended and pitched a tent. The techniques don’t change much between them. The risk level does.
At a developed site, your risk profile drops. Wild animals avoid noise and smell, so they tend to stay clear of busy campgrounds. Two-legged predators tend to avoid an audience too. You also have built-in communication options — a payphone, a ranger, a radio in the office. The trade-off is the experience itself.
Undeveloped camping is harder to prepare for because you don’t always know exactly where you’ll end up. When you do find your spot, take a minute to think about it the way you’d walk through your living room at home. Where’s my cover? Where would I move? Where can someone approach from without warning? Pick the higher ground when you can.
Drive-In vs. Pack-In
The other variable that quietly drives most of the rest of these decisions is whether you’re driving in or packing in. If it fits in the trunk, you can have it. If you have to carry it on your back for five days, every ounce gets weighed against its purpose. That distinction shows up immediately in how you secure your firearm at night.
Securing Your Firearm Overnight
The best practice is unchanged from your bedroom at home: take the gun off, lock it up, keep access close. A quick-access safe works. A small steel lockbox works. That’s the gold standard, and if you’re car camping, there’s no reason not to bring one.
Backpacking changes the equation. You’re not carrying a steel lockbox on a multi-day trip. So the question becomes: what’s the next best thing?
This is the one scenario where I’ll endorse a firearm-disabling device — products like the SAF-T-LOK that physically prevent the gun from firing until you unlock them. In day-to-day carry, I don’t use them and don’t recommend them. But on a backpacking trip, they give you something a holster alone doesn’t: a cognition barrier. You can’t unlock and access the gun until you’re awake enough to perform a deliberate sequence of actions. Riley has used a SAF-T-LOK on a J-frame revolver for exactly this purpose for years.
Whatever you choose, the principle is the same. You don’t want a gun with the trigger exposed sitting next to you in a tent, especially if there are kids in there too, and especially if you’re a sound sleeper waking up disoriented in an unfamiliar place. Some form of two-step access is non-negotiable.
A few other tent details that matter:
- Keep the gun off the tent floor. Dew, condensation, and the occasional flood will ruin your night. Stash it elevated and away from the walls, and bring a small lubrication tube, a bore snake, and a rag in your pack for field maintenance.
- Stage a light and your glasses. If you wear contacts or glasses, you can’t make a defensive decision you can’t see. Light, glasses, gun — in that order, stacked where you can reach them without thinking.
- Lock the zipper from the inside. A small padlock, a carabiner, or even a twisty-tie binding the zippers together is not a real barrier. But it’s a discouragement. Anyone unzipping the tent has to make a louder, slower decision instead of a quiet one.
Less Lethal Belongs in the Kit Too
Bear spray is one of the genuinely effective tools for outdoor defense, and it works on humans the same way OC works on bears.
Bear spray is not pepper spray on steroids. Plenty of bear spray formulations are actually less potent in OC concentration than the personal-defense spray on your dresser. What bear spray gives you is volume and range. A typical can carries dozens of bursts and reaches thirty feet or more. Personal OC tops out around ten to fifteen feet for the stronger stuff.
So pick your bear spray for OC content (2% is plenty stout), volume, and range. Test-fire it once in a while — press the trigger to confirm it’s pressurized and see how far it actually shoots. Then replace it when it’s past its date. It’s not the kind of gear you want to discover has failed in the moment.
Food, Smell, and Why Animals End Up at Your Tent
This is more outdoor survival than self-defense, but it ties directly to defensive risk. The reason an animal ends up at your campsite is almost always food smell.
- Sleep well away from where you cooked and stored food. Different zone entirely.
- Store food in a bear box suspended six feet off the ground and four feet out from the trunk of the tree. If a bear box isn’t an option, double up — sealed packaging inside a cooler inside a vehicle is better than any one of those alone.
- Brush your teeth, wash dishes, and handle anything with a scent profile away from your sleeping area.
Riley had a tent in Idaho destroyed by what he presumed was a grizzly years ago. The food had been sealed in packaging inside a bag — and the bear walked right to the bag and into the tent anyway. Their noses are better than you think they are.
Bears get most of the attention here because they’re the largest threat on the continent, but they’re not the only one. Mountain lion attacks happen every year, particularly in the West. Snakes are a real concern in a lot of country. The point isn’t to be paranoid, it’s to recognize that defensive thinking outdoors covers a broader threat menu than it does on a city sidewalk.
Know the Laws Where You’re Going
Carrying outdoors means crossing jurisdictional lines, and the rules change with the land underneath your boots. Three broad categories:
National Forests
About as permissive as it gets. There’s no general prohibition on possession or use of a firearm in a national forest, beyond common-sense restrictions — don’t shoot near a road, don’t shoot in or near a campground, you know the drill.
National Parks, National Monuments, National Memorials, and State Parks
At Lake Lodge In Yellowstone National Park 2017
These are now grouped together for firearm-law purposes. Since 2011, firearm regulations in National Park Service properties mirror the state-park rules of whichever state the property sits in. So look up your state’s state-park rules, and you’ve effectively got the answer for any national park, monument, or memorial in that state.
Two important caveats:
- Federal buildings inside those parks remain off-limits. Visitor centers, lodges, ranger stations, restrooms attached to those buildings, no firearms. The National Park Service does a reasonable job of marking these. Look for the signs. There is some pending legal action to change this but for now best to comply if able.
- Parking lots of those buildings are a gray area. A federal appellate ruling out of Colorado sustained an arrest for possession in a post-office parking lot. That’s one circuit, and post offices have some of their own quirks, but it’s enough that I’d be cautious if I’m trying to follow the letter of the law.
BLM Land, Public Land, County Property
The most variable category by far. Rules change state to state, county to county, sometimes parcel to parcel. There’s no national shortcut — do the homework for your specific destination.
A few other things worth knowing before you book a site:
- KOA has a corporate national policy prohibiting firearms on any of their properties. Their land, their rules.
- Tribal reservations operate as sovereign jurisdictions. Rules vary widely and are often hard to research. The safe default is to assume restrictions and verify before you cross.
- Private campgrounds can post no-firearms policies. Whether that policy has legal teeth depends on your state, but at minimum they can ask you to leave.
Does Castle Doctrine Cover Your Tent or RV?
A common question: if I’m sleeping in my RV, my camper, or my tent, do I have castle doctrine protection?
In the 37 stand-your-ground states, the question is mostly academic. There’s no duty to retreat anywhere in those states, so whether your sleeping space qualifies as a “dwelling” doesn’t change much.
In the 13 duty-to-retreat states, it matters a lot — because all 13 of those states have castle doctrine laws that remove the duty to retreat when you’re in a qualifying place. The question is whether a tent, camper, or RV qualifies.
The terms vary by state, most commonly dwelling, premise, or habitation. Some states define those terms in statute; others leave them to case law. The reasonable expectation in most states is that a tent, camper, or RV, anything purpose-built for someone to sleep in, qualifies as a dwelling under that state’s castle doctrine. But “reasonable expectation” is not the same as “I checked.” Look up your state.
There’s a related issue beyond duty to retreat. Some states create a legal presumption of risk of death when you’re inside a qualifying dwelling. That presumption effectively removes the proportionality requirement, meaning you don’t have to match the threat’s level of force the way you would outside. That’s the kind of nuance that can mean the difference between a clean shoot and a long legal fight.
Our mobile app has the duty-to-retreat status of every state in the laws section. It’s the fastest way to check what category you’re in before you head out.
Caliber, Bullet Choice, and the Bear Question
There’s a lot of internet advice telling you that hiking and camping require a .44 Magnum minimum and anything less is irresponsible. I used to be closer to that camp myself. I’ve changed my mind, and the reason is the data.
Dean Weingarten at Ammoland has been tracking documented cases of handgun defense against bears for years. At last count, he was at over 200 cases with a 97% success rate. That count includes everything, .357 Magnum and .44 Magnum, sure, but also 9mm, .380, and even .22 rimfire. Six cases involving .22s went five for six. Seven 9mm cases went seven for seven. He continues to update the count, and the trend has held.
I’m not telling you to defend yourself against a grizzly with a .22. The point is that the dogma, “you need .44 Magnum or you’re undergunned” isn’t supported by the actual record. Nor is the old argument about penetration and ammo.
I’m not saying caliber and ammo don’t matter at all; I am saying that the data says almost any caliber with any type of ammo is likely to be effective at stopping a bear attack. If you want to maximize your odds, obviously a bigger caliber with a full meta jacket or other deep-penetrating design is going to be best.
Bring the gun you’ll actually carry. A 9mm on your hip is better than a .44 Magnum that’s too heavy and stays in the truck.
Where to Carry the Gun With a Pack On
The single most important takeaway from Todd Orr’s grizzly mauling in Montana is this: a gun in your pack is a gun you cannot get to. He survived two attacks from the same bear, and one of his after-action lessons was that his gun had been inaccessible when he needed it most.
Whatever you carry on a regular day, your carry method needs to survive the addition of a pack. Some options:
- Appendix (AIWB). Works well with a backpack once you adjust the pack belt to ride below your gun belt. A little tweaking of ride height is usually required. This is Riley’s setup and mine.
- 3 o’clock OWB. A traditional OWB holster (We recommend the Trenton from KSG) keeps the gun on the hip outside the pack belt’s path. Doesn’t require pack adjustment.
- Chest rig or chest bag. Increasingly popular and very accessible. A simple chest bag sits above the pack’s sternum strap and stays accessible through layer changes. Trade-off is profile: you’re not low-key in any sense, so factor in where you’re carrying and who you’ll meet on the trail.
- Fanny pack. Out of place in town, perfectly normal on a hike. A reasonable option for off-body carry that’s still accessible.
S&W J-frame revolver in a KSG Saratoga Holster in a Waist pack
What flatly does not work: 4 or 5 o’clock IWB with a backpack on. The pack belt sits directly over the holster, you can’t access the gun without dropping the pack, and the gun digs into your back the entire hike. If that’s your normal carry position, plan to change it for backcountry trips.
Medical Is a Different Game in the Backcountry
In an urban environment, your job with a trauma response is to keep someone alive for the 12 to 15 minutes it takes EMS to arrive. In the backcountry, that window stretches — sometimes to an hour, sometimes to several. Sometimes you have to move the casualty before you can even call for help.
You still need everything you’d normally have: tourniquets, chest seals, gauze, pressure bandages, hemostatic dressing, gloves, shears. You just need to think one level harder about it.
- Extra gauze and extra pressure bandages. Sustained bleeding management is a different problem on a longer timeline.
- A litter, or the materials and know-how to improvise one. Tarps, clothing, and trekking poles can become a litter if you’ve thought about it before you needed to.
- If you’re driving in, bring the bigger kit and stage it in the vehicle. If you’re packing in, scale down — but don’t go below the basics.
Communication Is a Defensive Tool
If you can’t reach help, every other layer of your plan gets harder. Before you leave, know where cell coverage ends. Know what your backup is when it does.
A ham radio is one of the better backups available, and the entry barrier is lower than people think. A handheld like the BaoFeng UV-5R runs around $30. A technician license is a weekend of study and an in-person test. Once you have it, you can use repeaters that vastly extend the range of a handheld — in Colorado, the Colorado Connection Repeaters network lets a handheld in Gunnison reach someone in Denver.
Riley and his wife both have ham licenses and share a frequency plan for exactly this reason. If he doesn’t check in on schedule from somewhere remote, she knows where to listen. That’s the kind of redundancy that costs almost nothing and pays back the one time you actually need it.
Two things worth knowing:
- You don’t need a license to use ham frequencies in a true life-threatening emergency. The FCC carved that exception out specifically. You can also pick up National Weather Service emergency broadcasts on most of these radios without any license at all.
- The license is still worth getting if you spend much time in the backcountry. Operating proficiently matters more than holding the paperwork.
Image courtesy of Garmin.com
These days satellite communication options are also becoming more prevalent. The newest iPhones and Android phones have emergency text messaging capabilities via satellite. Satellite phones are becoming more affordable and the Garmin InReach communication system is affordable as well.
Putting It Together
Camping, hiking, and backpacking are some of the best ways to spend your time. None of what I’ve laid out is meant to scare you out of doing any of it, it’s meant to make sure your defensive thinking comes with you when you go.
Pick your campsite with intent. Stage your gear so you can find and access it half-asleep in the dark. Know the laws under your boots. Carry the gun you’ll actually carry, in a position that survives a pack on your back. Communicate before you need to. And bring the trauma kit you hope you never open.
Train right, train often, and train safe, so you can fight hard, fight fast, and fight true.
