Free download from ProPassion Outdoors

Every planning task for a day trip or overnight, sequenced from eight weeks out to the drive home.

• Eight to four weeks out
• Four to two weeks out
• One week out
• Two days out
• Morning of
• On the trip
• The drive home debrief

Send me the checklist

The permit that was never pulled, the campsite that filled, the shuttle nobody booked, the map that covers the wrong drainage, the trailer bearing that should have been repacked in April. None of those go wrong on the trip. They go wrong at home, weeks before, when the task existed in someone's head but was never written down and never assigned. By the time you notice, the fix is either expensive or impossible.

This checklist is organized by when a task has to happen rather than by category, because the deadlines are not yours to set. Permits and popular sites go early. Anything you have to order arrives on a shipping schedule. A forecast is not worth reading until roughly two days out, and the road and water conditions you actually care about are a morning-of question. Put each task in the window where it can be done and the last-minute scramble mostly disappears.

The debrief phase takes five minutes and pays for itself every time. On the drive home you still remember the thing you wished you had brought, the piece of gear that failed, the turn you missed and the food nobody touched. Write it down before you unpack. That short list becomes the head start on your next trip, and it is the difference between planning a trip once and planning the same trip badly over and over.

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