Welcome to episode 19 of the first 40 miles.

If you're new to backpacking, or if you're hopelessly in love with someone who wants you to love

backpacking, then this podcast is for you. We'll talk about the

essentials, how to lighten your load, and how to make the most of your time on the

trail. I'm your host Heather Legler. And'm Josh Legler and this is the first 40 miles.

Today on the first 40 miles this land was made for you and me and 132,000 acres of redwood trees in the Redwood

National and State Park.

Next, we share our top five tips for planning backpacking trips in the national forests.

On the summit gear review, we'll show you a first aid essential that's lighter than a band-aid.

For the backpack hack of the week, you'll learn a simple trick to reduce pack bulk.

And we'll wrap up the show with a little trail wisdom from our good friend on the trail,

writer and anthropologist Richard Nelson.

All this, and that's about it, today on the first 40 miles.

Spring Break is right around the corner for our family and so we've been planning a trip.

We've got four kids plus the two of us and we want to go backpacking and so we've been trying to figure out where to go. We've decided to head down to the Redwoods in Northern California as our destination.

And just because we've been doing some research and trying to plan for the trip, we thought it would be helpful to kind of talk through some of the decisions that we've been making and some of the information that we've been gathering just to help those who are listening

to get a sense of how that process works when you're planning a backpacking trip.

One of the big challenges for planning this trip is that it's really easy to find car camping.

You just go to a national park or state park website and you can see the campground map, pick

your spot, make your reservation, you're done.

It's really built to make it easy. But if you want to go backpacking, you have to do a little more

digging and research because when you're out backpacking half the time you're not even going to be in a quote-unquote camp site that's been

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