In this day and age, we’re all taught to be careful with our stuff. Nobody likes to have things stolen, especially when it’s something valuable that you’ve spent your hard earned cash on. Most of the time in day to day life, keeping your belongings safe is common sense: Don’t leave stuff lying around; don’t walk along a busy street with your wallet hanging out of your back pocket; lock your car and house when you leave, and so on.
But camping makes it a little harder to follow the usual common sense precautions. After all, a tent isn’t a house, but a flimsy piece of fabric that poses no challenge to a potential thief.
So, what can we do to help keep our stuff safe when camping?
This article will list 12 critical tips for increasing your camping security.
But first, a little note on locks…
Should You Lock Your Tent Zippers?
There is interesting psychology surrounding padlocking your zippers. Surprisingly, the general school of thought is to not bother. A padlocked tent is going to make it look like there is valuable stuff inside, otherwise, why would you bother locking it?
Locking your zips may actually make your tent more attractive to a would-be thief.
Furthermore, after making your tent a target by locking it, you’re then making it more likely that if the would-be thief decides to take a look inside, your tent will be destroyed in the process.
At least if you don’t lock your zips, your tent will still be in one piece!
However, in saying that, if you have a separate rain fly and are determined to lock something, locking the inner zips where they’re not visible to someone walking past could be a good option. An opportunist thief would then find himself in the vestibule of your tent, suddenly needing a penknife to cut through the fabric. If he is determined though, the lock isn’t going to be much of a deterrent and you may still end up with a slashed tent.
Bearing all this in mind, there are many other things you can do that are a sure fire way of increasing your camping security.
12 Camping Security Tips
- Pitch Your Tent Somewhere Busy
- Know Your Neighbors
- Leave Valuables at Home
- Don’t Leave Valuables Unattended
- Make Use of Your Car
- Keep Valuables Out of Sight
- Lock Larger Items to Something Fixed
- Set up a Laptop Alarm
- Sleep with your Valuables
- Lock up your Valuables
- Make it Look as if Someone is Home
- Make it Sound as if Someone is Home
1. Pitch Your Tent Somewhere Busy
Strategically placing your tent somewhere with just the right amount of human foot traffic helps immensely when it comes to deterring potential thieves, as it’s too risky to enter a foreign tent when there are lots of people around and there is a high chance that one of those people is the tent’s owner.
Obviously, you don’t want to be somewhere so noisy that you won’t get any sleep. But being located en route to the toilet block is going to be a safer bet than the far corner of the campsite with a dense patch of trees behind!
2. Know Your Neighbors
In the same vein as the tip above, your camping neighbors can be your best friends when it comes to campsite security.
Stopping by for a quick chat and introducing yourself to your neighbors may be the difference between a stranger entering your tent, or being recognized by your neighbors and scared off.
Likewise, once you know your neighbors, you can return the favor and keep an eye on their tent for them.
3. Leave Valuables at Home
I think we can all agree that one aspect of camping is to get away from the excessive use of technology. Do you really need to bring all of your valuables with you?
Think carefully about what you actually need, or imagine how you’d feel if each item in your bag disappeared during your camping trip.
Sometimes you may just be better off leaving your valuables at home and just bring the bare essentials.
For example, how about leaving your watch behind and just using your phone? Or how about leaving your phone behind if you’re going to be going somewhere with no signal anyway? You could just bring one credit card and leave the rest of your wallet behind. And bring a book instead of a tablet.
The same goes for expensive clothes and shoes or anything that might be attractive to a potential thief.
4. Don’t Leave Valuables Unattended
Once you’ve established what valuables do really need to come with you, use some common sense and keep them on you. Don’t leave your phone in the tent if you’re not ok with the idea of it being gone by the time you come back.
Keep your camp contained within a reasonable area and don’t spread your belongings over the campsite. It’s a good idea to keep all of your stuff within easy reach of your tent so that you can keep an eye on it.
5. Make Use of Your Car
If you have a car, making use of it as a secure place to store valuables makes a lot of sense. Of course, cars aren’t thief proof. But, they’re a lot more secure than a tent, and the boot provides an ideal location to keep valuables hidden.
This doesn’t just go for the obvious things either. Say you’re going for a day hike and plan on leaving your car parked next to your tent. Things like camp stoves, gas canisters, and even food, can be easy targets for thieves who are just looking for things that they can use to save themselves from having to buy them.
In the past, I have gone as far as chucking everything in the boot of my car, including bedroll and sleeping bag. It was good quality gear and the inconvenience that I would have been caused if that stuff disappeared was significant. Of course, that left the tent empty and at risk of being stolen itself, but that was a risk I decided to take.
6. Keep Valuables Out of Sight
If you don’t have a car, and you really need to leave some stuff behind for your day trip, keeping things hidden can go a long way towards making your stuff less attractive to a thief.
This is especially the case if you’ve left your tent semi-open so that anyone passing by can see that there is nothing of interest inside.
I make a habit of only leaving my sleeping bag and bedroll visible (with some dirty clothes spread about of course) and anything else gets tucked inside my sleeping (or inside the said dirty clothes).
7. Lock Larger Items to Something Fixed
Larger items like camping fridges, stoves and barbecues can be secured to something immovable like a railing, power pole, tree, or around the wheel of your vehicle. Cable locks with alarms are a great option as they will alert people to the intrusion if they are tampered with.
It may seem over-cautious, but a surprising amount of camp fridges get stolen from campsites, contents and all!
Alarms are also an especially good idea at night (though not so much from your neighbor’s point of view…) You may think you’re a light sleeper and likely to wake if anybody comes near your tent. But it’s surprising what you can sleep through in the quiet and fresh air of a camping environment.
8. Set up a Laptop Alarm
Another motion sensor style alarm is a laptop alarm which is essentially a smaller version of the alarmed cable lock mentioned earlier. If you really have to leave anything in your tent that you’d be disappointed to lose, attaching a motion sensor could be an excellent deterrent. If the potential thief can handle having a shrill, eardrum-bursting alarm go off for 30 seconds before making off with your stuff, then all credit to him.
9. Sleep with your Valuables
The least likely place a potential thief will want to rummage is through your sleeping bag when you’re inside it. This makes the bottom of your sleeping bag the ideal place to store valuables at night.
Stories exist of thieves being familiar with the locations of interior pockets on certain tent models and using a knife to access the tent at that precise location. This isn’t common, but it also may not be worth taking the risk if your valuables are really valuable.
I typically leave my head torch and kindle in the small pocket next to my head while I sleep, but if you have something more valuable like a smartphone or tablet, it would be devastating to wake up in the morning with a small hole where your stuff once was.
Tuck it away safely with your feet to be extra certain that it will be there when you wake up.
10. Lock up your Valuables
This is relevant to people who aren’t car camping and don’t have the option of leaving things in the car. It’s not an ideal solution, but containing your belongings inside a bag which can then be locked inside a Pacsafe Exomesh could be worth considering if you have a number of things that you want to keep safe.
The Exomesh is basically a cable lock but in a mesh style which encloses the whole bag and makes it very difficult to get inside and extract anything. There aren’t many manufacturers of the technology so Pacsafe stuff is a little pricey, but if you could attach the mesh to a cable lock and then attach that to something immovable outside of the tent then you’ve got a pretty secure set up.
Of course, if you can’t lock it to something outside of the tent then you run the risk of someone taking off with the whole bag, but it’s an option.
11. Make it Look as if Someone is Home
This is a similar point to the debate surrounding locking your zips. It all comes down to psychology.
If the tent is all zipped up and everything is tidily packed away, it’s more likely that nobody is home and the tent is fair game.
Leaving your tent slightly unzipped, and maybe with the dirty socks or wet laundry hanging around, may make it look as though someone is inside or nearby.
I personally love leaving my dirty socks strategically placed on top of my sleeping bag as I can’t imagine someone wanting to rummage much further than that. I also find that a good combination of zipping is to leave the interior mesh doors done up but the fly only half zipped. This makes it look like someone is either inside or nearby, but you can’t quite see in well enough to check.
Ultimately, however, it comes down to personal preference and what you’re comfortable with.
12. Make it Sound as if Someone is Home
Finally, in keeping with the theme of deception, as well as leaving your dirty laundry out to dry, leaving a small battery powered radio singing quietly to itself in your tent while you’re gone could make it seem as if someone is chilling out in the tent and be a further deterrent to potential thieves.
This may seem over-kill, but hey, if it works, why not?
I actually played around with the idea of playing a talk show with a male voice when I went camping alone in a more remote area, so that it wasn’t immediately obvious that I was a solo woman. I didn’t end up doing it but the idea had potential!
Get creative! It might be fun to think of more interesting ways to increase your camping security!
Camping Alone
Camping alone raises other security questions, less related to your stuff and more related to personal safety. Women, in particular, are warned to be careful when camping alone.
However, certain precautions are easy to take and can make a huge difference when it comes to personal safety.
- Pitching your tent close to other campers and the campground amenities means that you are in a position to call for help and likely to be less vulnerable in the first place. It also means you don’t have to walk as far at night if you need to get up to go to the toilet.
- Carrying a good torch and a personal alarm will make you feel safer and will be a good deterrent.
- Speaking to the campground staff or ranger, letting them know that you are alone, getting a contact number for them or asking them to help keep an eye on your tent when they’re passing by could be an option worth considering.
- Informing family and friends of your plans and arranging to check in with them on a regular basis will add an extra layer of security.
- Finally, following the 12 tips listed earlier is sure to increase your security as they are all equally relevant to someone camping alone.
Festival Camping
Festivals are notorious for being rife with undesirable characters who will happily make off with your stuff. They also may not necessarily be hardened thieves but people with chemically altered (read: drug and alcohol altered) morals, who when sober could be perfectly reasonable humans, but under festival, circumstances wouldn’t hesitate before taking advantage of some unsupervised belongings.
Most of the tips listed above still apply. But there are some extra festival specific things you can bear in mind:
- While I don’t usually advocate buying cheap, single use gear due to the environmental cost of wasted resources, using old or second hand gear could be a good decision in a festival environment.
- Take the advice to leave all valuables at home very, very literally. Pack as light as possible. The less stuff you have with you, the less stuff you will worry about losing.
- Some festivals have a secure storage option where you can submit things like car keys to be looked after securely for you for the duration of the festival.
- Use team work. Take turns with your buddies to return to your tent regularly to keep up a presence and check on things.
Insurance
Another option to consider is travel insurance for the duration of your camping trip, or checking to see whether your personal belongings are insured under your home and contents policy.
Check with your insurance provider to see whether you’d be covered for anything stolen while camping, and if not, a short travel insurance policy might be worth the investment if you have a lot of expensive gear.
Conclusion
So that concludes this article on camping security. Hopefully, it has given you some useful tips and interesting things to bear in mind when camping.
At the end of the day, camping security comes down to using the same common sense that you would when not camping: Don’t leave things unattended and secure or hide your belongings where possible.
Of course, the psychological question of locking your tent zips or leaving your tent unzipped may seem counter intuitive at first, but it’s worth thinking about it from the potential thief’s perspective!
All things considered, your best bet is to leave your valuables at home and only go camping with stuff that you can handle the thought of losing. You won’t be devastated if it does get stolen, and you won’t be worrying about it while you’re away from your tent either: win-win!
On that note, don’t let security concerns stop you from camping and enjoying yourself. In general, most campsites are safe places with a low chance of things getting stolen.
So, get out there and enjoy your camping trip! Thanks for reading in at Simple Tenting and please subscribe to our page below!