How to Survive in the Woods: Camping, Fires, Trailing, Tramping, Getting Lost, and Finding Your Way Home

Connect to nature and live to tell the tale

Connect to nature and live to tell the tale with this camping guide packed with practical knowledge from a time before ultralight backpacking gadgets, synthetic rainwear, and cell phones. The emphasis is on preparation and survival, starting with how to plan your trip, pick your companions, how to get to your campsite, and what gear, food, and clothes to bring along. You’ll learn to choose a good campsite and set up your tarp or build a lean-to, and navigate on your backcountry trek. There’s an extensive section on wilderness first aid, plus guides to backwoods housekeeping and cooking, blazing a trail, starting a fire without a match, sending smoke signals, and choosing the best axe.

In the words of the author, “Camping calls for old clothes, lack of luxuries and conveniences, primitive life, and unfailing good temper and cheerfulness under all conditions, as well as plenty of hard work and a willingness to do one’s share of anything and everything without being asked.” If roughing it is more your style than glamping, this guide will spark your imagination and help you plan your next trip.

Keep reading for an excerpt of Elly Blue’s foreword to How to Survive in the Woods, our new edition of A. Hyatt Verrill’s Book of Camping, first published in 1917. Shipping direct from the Microcosm site starting December 8th, or available from your favorite local Microcosm purveyor in April 2026!

Want to reconnect with nature and spend more time in the woods?

Have we got the products for you!

Just kidding. But also, kind of not. Like everything else in modern society, our relationship with the wild world has been put through the wringer of what cultural critic Anne Helen Petersen calls “the sinkhole of optimization culture.” Want to go camping? Obviously, you need a tent. But not just any tent, you need to find the best one: ideally the tent with the best reviews, at the perfect price point, and with the weight, size, and color that best fits your trip, budget, and personality.

And it’s not just the tent: you need the perfect sleeping bag, sleeping pad, backpack, camping stove, dehydrated meals, water filter. Not to mention picking the destination. At least, if you’re not so exhausted by your research that you opt to spend the weekend indoors scrolling on your phone instead.

Take as a remedy this book originally published in 1917 as The Book of Camping by Alpheus Hyatt Verrill. Verrill lays out a list of items to bring, but instead of spilling ink on how to choose the “best” type of camping, he jumps right into what he sees as the most important choice: choosing the right camping companions. Only after that does he invite you to carefully consider your packing list, and goes on to offer extensive guides to the skills he thinks you’ll need, from tracking to cookery to first aid. He’s fiercely opinionated about what type of axe you bring, but believes you don’t even need a tent—a tarp and some rope will do, maybe a piece of mosquito netting.

Of course, in this author’s lifetime, ultra-lightweight tents weren’t available; if they were, you might have found him holding forth about the best make and model around the campfire (which he wouldn’t have needed a match to start). You may decide you’d like to journey back in time and camp exactly as he advises in this book, but we suspect it’s more likely that you’ll take the tools, advice, and reminders that suit your needs and enjoy contemplating the rest from the comfort of your cozy nest of modern materials, knowing that if some disaster strikes, you’ll be better prepared than before.

Critical thinking and making your own choices are key to both surviving in the woods and reading this book. While colorful and competent, this book is full of reminders of why its author might not be the ideal camping companion for the modern reader. A friend and contemporary of Theodore Roosevelt, he was an “explorer,” zoologist, inventor, artist, and prodigious writer of popular science and science fiction. Verrill traveled the world and wrote about the people he met, but it’s clear that at least as of this writing, he had not taken the opportunity to reflect with humility on his prejudices about them. He wrote this book implicitly for a young, able-bodied, white male reader of his time. We’ve chosen to republish this work so today’s readers can take what they need. Just as we are not editing out the author’s insistence that the second-most important piece of gear for any camper is a good axe, we are also including his most objectionable language and perspec-tives intact. This is to avoid hiding or protecting his legacy from scrutiny, and so we don’t forget the cultural norms and assumptions of just a century ago. It’s also because we trust you, today’s reader, to know your own mind and think through everything you read in forming your own opinions.

If you read only one book about camping, you’ll have one person’s strong opinions about camping. As a teenager (coincidentally, growing up, like Verrill, in New Haven, Connecticut), I read as many camping and backpacking books as I could get my hands on. Once I achieved my goal—the Appalachian Trail—I immediately found that the reality in the woods was far different than what any of those books described. I had prepared myself for a solitary wilderness survival trip and was delighted to find myself in a haphazard linear sort of party instead. I needed very different skills to survive the highly social atmosphere than what I’d prepared for. Instead of basking in the perfection of my thoroughly-researched plans, I learned the key lessons of surviving in the woods: improvisation, openness to learn and work hard, and—a lesson that still holds true a century later—the importance of choosing my traveling companions wisely and being a good campmate myself.

Elly Blue
Portland, OR
July 2025

Learn how to camp (and have a good time doing it) with How to Survive in the Woods by A. Hyatt Verrill, featuring a new foreword by Elly Blue. Shipping from Microcosm starting December 8th, or coming soon to a shelf near you!