About CampingHour — Who We Are and How We Build Our Content
Why We Built This
The frustration that led to CampingHour is probably familiar: you’re planning a camping trip, you search for ‘how much water to bring camping,’ and you get either a generic ‘2 litres per person per day’ answer that doesn’t account for anything specific to your trip, or you get a 3,000-word article full of affiliate links and vague advice that still doesn’t tell you what to pack.
We wanted tools that actually work for Canadian conditions — because camping in the Okanagan in July is a completely different water calculation from camping in Algonquin in September, and advice that doesn’t acknowledge that isn’t useful.
So we built a water calculator that accounts for activity level, climate, group composition, and trip length. We wrote guides based on experience in specific Canadian parks rather than generic outdoor advice. And we kept the site light on ads so it’s actually readable.
Who Writes the Content
We're a small team of Canadian campers. Between us, we've done multi-day canoe trips in Algonquin, backcountry hiking in the Rockies, car camping on Vancouver Island, and cold-weather winter camping in the Laurentians. We're not experts in everything — we say so when we're not — but we write from direct experience rather than research alone.
If a guide says 'the blackflies in Algonquin run until mid-June' or 'Kananaskis is significantly less crowded than Banff,' it's because someone on our team has been there enough times to know that.
How Our Calculators Work
Our water calculator uses the following inputs: adults (2L/day base), children (1.5L/day base), pets (0.5L/day base), days, activity multiplier (1.0× at camp, 1.4× day hiking, 1.8× backpacking), and climate multiplier (1.0× cool & shaded, 1.2× typical summer, 1.5× hot & exposed). The optional safety buffer adds 20% to the total.
These figures come from hydration research and calibration against our own field experience. The 2L base is the widely accepted minimum for resting adults in mild conditions. The multipliers reflect real increases in sweat rate and exertion. The 20% buffer is our recommendation, not a requirement.
What We Don't Do
We don’t take payment for placing specific gear in our guides. If we recommend the Sawyer Squeeze filter or a Big Agnes tent, it’s because we use them or have used them, not because someone paid us to mention them. We use affiliate links on some product recommendations that’s disclosed where it occurs. The editorial decisions are ours.
We don’t pretend to know everything about every park in Canada. Where our direct experience is limited, we say so and link to Parks Canada or provincial park resources where the official information is more current than anything we could provide.
Contact and Corrections
If something in our calculators or guides is wrong a park that changed its booking system, a trail that’s been rerouted, a water calculation that doesn’t match your experience please tell us. We’d rather fix it than leave wrong information up.
Email: hello@campinghour.com