Camping Trivia
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256 free Camping trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
49 free Camping trivia questions with answers. Camping trivia is perfect for the campfire itself, a scout meeting, a road-trip game or a lodge quiz night. This set covers the whole outdoors: the Victorian tailor who founded the first camping club, the year Yellowstone became the first national park, who first published a s'mores recipe, why the world's largest campground chain charged $1.75 a night, where you are legally allowed to pitch a tent on private land, and how a five-pound bear cub became the face of wildfire prevention. The questions run from easy warm-ups any kid who has toasted a marshmallow will get, to genuinely hard ones about the Euklisia rug, the Ten Essentials and Apollo astronauts quarantined in an Airstream. Difficulty is marked on every question so you can pick a round for the group in front of you. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia and the primary sources it cites, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 256 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01A classic s'more sandwiches a toasted marshmallow and chocolate between what?
Graham crackers
Graham crackers take their name from Sylvester Graham, a 19th-century minister who preached a plain wholewheat diet to curb lust; his sober health biscuit ended up as the base of a campfire sweet.
Q 02A 1927 publication from which youth organization contained an early recipe for 'Some More'?
Girl Scouts
Girl Scouts printed the recipe, which packs two toasted marshmallows into each sandwich and then warns that though it tastes like 'some more', one is really enough.
Q 03Which rash-causing plant are campers taught to avoid with the rhyme 'Leaves of three, let it be'?
Poison ivy
Poison ivy carries three glossy leaflets on each leaf, and its sap holds an oil, urushiol, that lingers on boots, tools and pet fur, so campers can pick up the rash without touching the plant.
Q 04Thomas Hiram Holding, often called the founder of modern camping, made his own lightweight tents thanks to which day job?
Tailor
Tailor: Holding wrote manuals on cutting coats and breeches, and his passion for camping began in boyhood, when his family crossed the American prairies in a wagon train.
Q 05Possibly the world's first commercial camping ground, Cunningham's camp, opened in 1894 on which island?
Isle of Man
Isle of Man: Cunningham's holiday camp for young men opened there under canvas in 1894; in the First World War the same camp was turned into an internment camp.
Q 06Campers find Polaris, the North Star, by following the two 'pointer' stars of which star pattern?
The Big Dipper
The Big Dipper's two outer bowl stars, Dubhe and Merak, line up on Polaris, the star that marks north, so a camper without a compass can still take a bearing on a clear night.
Q 07American camping is often traced to W. H. H. Murray's 1869 book on which New York mountain region?
The Adirondacks
The Adirondacks saw the effect at once: Murray's 'Camp-Life in the Adirondacks' set off a flood of visitors to the mountains that very summer.
Q 08Which carmaker joined Edison, Firestone and Burroughs on the 'Vagabonds' camping trips of the 1910s?
Henry Ford
Henry Ford and his friends toured by car with reporters in tow; the trips doubled as rolling advertisements for Ford cars and Firestone tires and made auto camping fashionable.
Q 09Which country enshrines a right of public access to privately held wilderness in its constitution?
Sweden
Sweden wrote allemansrätten into its constitution in 1994; it lets anyone pitch a tent on uncultivated land for a night or two without asking the owner.
Q 10Norway's right to roam lets you camp on uncultivated land for two nights, provided the tent is 150 metres from what?
An inhabited house
An inhabited house or cabin must be at least 150 metres away, out of consideration for those who live there; after two nights you need the owner's consent, except high in the mountains.
Q 11The Land Reform Act of 2003 gave wild campers a right of responsible access to most land in which UK nation?
Scotland
Scotland lets you pitch a small tent on most unenclosed land for two or three nights; south of the border, wild camping generally still needs the landowner's permission.
Q 12Which blend word means camping with the comforts of a hotel?
Glamping
Glamping blends 'glamorous' and 'camping', but the idea is far older than the word, as on the lavish tented safaris of the early twentieth century.
Q 13Which 1520 summit of Henry VIII and Francis I needed thousands of tents?
Field of the Cloth of Gold
Q 21A pup tent, meant for one to three people, is a small version of which basic design?
Ridge
Ridge: the army's pup tent is a small ridge tent that comes in halves; each soldier carries one sheet and half the poles, then pairs off with a comrade to fasten together a shelter for two.
Q 22The Sibley tent, patented by a US Army officer in 1856, is a version of which shelter?
A bell tent
A bell tent is the family the Sibley belongs to; its inventor was owed a royalty on each one, but he resigned to join the Confederacy, so the Union's thousands of Sibley tents earned him nothing.
Q 23Columbus's crews first saw hammocks among which people, whose word for them reached English through Spanish?
Taino
Field of the Cloth of Gold: the tents and costumes showed off so much fabric woven with silk and gold thread that the meeting near Calais was named after it.
Q 14Which outdoor brand grew from a gasoline-lamp business based in Wichita, Kansas from the early 1900s?
Coleman
Coleman began with W. C. Coleman's gasoline pressure lamps; in World War II the firm built a compact field stove for the military that thousands of American G.I.s carried overseas.
Q 15Which campground chain began in 1962 as a Montana stopover for World's Fair traffic?
Kampgrounds of America
Kampgrounds of America grew from Dave Drum's land on the Yellowstone River: he gave passing fairgoers hot showers, clean restrooms and a store, and the site filled so quickly that he was soon selling franchises.
Q 16Karl Elsener's workshop, which began supplying knives to the Swiss Army in 1891, grew into which company?
Victorinox
Victorinox joins Victoria, the name of Elsener's mother, which he took as his brand after her death in 1909, with 'inox', a French shorthand for stainless steel.
Q 17Which tick-borne illness, a risk for hikers and campers, is named after the Connecticut town where it was identified in 1975?
Lyme disease
Lyme disease was first taken for a cluster of childhood arthritis around Lyme and Old Lyme; investigators traced it to tick bites, which is why hikers check their skin after a day in the woods.
Q 18Mail-order pioneer Pryce Pryce-Jones patented the Euklisia Rug, a forerunner of the sleeping bag, in 1876 from which country?
Wales
Wales was home to Pryce-Jones, a Newtown draper who shipped local flannel by rail and post to customers including Queen Victoria and Florence Nightingale, then exported his rug around the world.
Q 19A sleeping bag that tapers from the head to the foot to cut volume and hold heat is named after what?
A mummy
A mummy bag hugs the body so there is less air inside to warm, and most add a drawstring hood with a cord lock so that warm air cannot escape around the head.
Q 20In a sleeping bag, how does down fill compare with synthetic fill?
Lighter and warmer, but costlier
Down is lighter and warmer, but costlier; synthetic fill wins in the wet, barely absorbing water and still giving some warmth when soaked through.
Taino islanders paddled out to Columbus's ships to barter cotton and 'hamacas, or nets, in which they sleep', as his journal of the first voyage records; Spanish kept the word as hamaca.
Q 24The word 'bivouac' reached English through French from a Germanic term for which military duty?
A night watch
A night watch: the German dialect word Beiwacht meant an extra guard kept beside the regular watch, and the men standing it stayed out in the open, the sense that 'bivouac' still carries.
Q 25Which organization developed the shiny foil emergency blanket, now wrapped around marathon finishers, in 1964?
NASA
NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center created the metallised film to insulate spacecraft, hence the name space blanket; in 1973 the agency turned to the same reflective material when the Skylab station overheated.
Q 26The insect repellent DEET was developed in the 1940s for which organization?
The United States Army
The United States Army wanted protection for its troops after the jungle fighting of World War II; DEET went to soldiers first and reached the public only in 1957.
Q 27Which scientist invented the vacuum flask in 1892 but never patented it?
James Dewar
James Dewar built it to keep liquefied gases cold and refused to patent it; German glassblowers turned it into the Thermos in 1904, and Dewar lost in court when he later tried to claim the rights.
Q 28Which knot is nicknamed the 'king of knots' and taught with a rhyme about a rabbit, a hole and a tree?
Bowline
The bowline earns its crown because the fixed loop it forms does not slip or bind under load, yet unties easily once the strain is off, which is why sailors, climbers and arborists all rely on it.
Q 29Which campfire lay stacks kindling in alternating crossed layers around the tinder?
Log cabin
A log cabin fire stacks kindling at right angles around the tinder like cabin walls; it is the lay least likely to collapse and it burns for a long time, so it makes a good cooking fire.
Q 30Bear-country campers should pitch the tent at least 100 yards from the food store and which other spot?
The cooking area
The cooking area smells of dinner just as the food store does, so each sits about 100 yards from the tent and nothing scented is taken to bed: a bear following its nose should never reach the sleepers.