One area Pickathon is looking to improve is our ability to help anyone camping in the woods settle into their respective campsites.

As we like to do this with most of our new ideas, we wanted to share our thoughts and get your feedback.

Let us start at the point when you arrive onsite with all your gear.

If you do not know where you should camp, the first thing you should do is head to the new and improved Campground Host. You can find the Campground Host by asking any volunteer or looking on the 2012 Pickathon sitemap. *The Campground Host is located at the north pedestrian overflow parking entrance which is just east of the entrance to the Quail trail that heads to the Woods Stage.

Once you have successfully arrived at the Campground Host we want to empower you on where you should start looking for your weekend campsite before you ever step into the woods. This will be possible by interacting with our friendly Campground Host crew to determine the best zones of available camping using a new large gridded map of Pendarvis Farm that breaks up the farm into small zones that are uniquely labeled.

At this point you need to go find your campsite in the woods, here we also have a newly improved vision for how this might happen. One initial suggestion is for you to consider sending one or two people in your party with enough gear to find and reserve a spot(s) while leaving someone else to sit and watch your gear back at the Campground Host. This way you don’t have to haul your gear to your campsite until you know where you plan on camping. As you look for your campsite you may encounter the all new Pickathon Campsite Scout, whose purpose is to help find the best available campsite for anyone that is looking.

Once you find your campsite you will then need to haul your gear to the chosen campsite (if you haven’t already). In years past we tried to figure out effective ways to provide some sort of cart system to help in this task, but the carts have been problematic every year (breaking down, creating long lines of frustrated people waiting, and were generally insufficient overall). This year we want to empower everyone to be prepared to haul their own gear as we believe it will be far less frustrating and if folks
plan ahead it will go way faster and smoother.

When planning on hauling your own gear to your campsite we suggest two possible strategies. The first
is to bring your own hauling device with big wheels such as a bike trailer or wagon, which is relatively easy to pull gear up trails in the woods. The second strategy is to think about bringing less stuff overall as Pickathon is full of amazing amenities such as quality and reasonably priced food, drink, and beer (think of it as backpacking in the woods except with great restaurants and showers). If hauling your own gear sounds like a serious issue don’t worry as we still will have a limited number of motorized gators assisting the neediest people to help get their gear close to their campsites in the woods, but it will be a tiny fraction of the overall campers who can count on this.

Once you have found your awesome 2012 Pickathon campsite you may want to make improvements (i.e. flatten your spot) and we plan to help here by introducing a way to checkout a limited number of shovels and other useful tools. Simply go to the Campground Host and swap an ID for a shovel and get the ID back when you return the shovel.

Well, that’s the plan and we hope that this can help everyone in advance and create known expectations for what will happen once arriving.

Let us know what you think.