If the camping world could claim a power couple, look to former Minnesotans Sarah Smith and Kevin Long.
The two are leveraging an outdoors aesthetic seeded in their youth here to produce their online platform the Dyrt that, like a good headlamp or reliable fire starter, is a camping essential.
Smith was born in St. Cloud, grew up in Bemidji, and fondly recounted a childhood of family camping trips in the Northwoods and beyond. Long is from Roseville, where his involvement in scouting helped source his love of the outdoors and nights spent in a sleeping bag.
Today, from their home in Portland, Ore. (and sometimes from the road), they've watched the Dyrt become the most-used camping review and booking app. Numbers back it up: There were 27 million visitors last year to the Dyrt's website and app. What's more: It took the app six years to crowdsource 2 million pictures, videos and reviews of campgrounds from users. In the past year, the Dyrt doubled that content, Long said.
Smith is getting the response she never could have envisioned when she rolled out a beta version of the Dyrt website in 2014. The first app was introduced in 2017, and today there is a premium version, the Dyrt PRO, with an annual membership price of $36 and next-level features such as trip-planning tools and downloadable maps for offline use from a vast database.
"It's really fun to see people with the same passion solving the same pain point [of finding a campground online]," said Long, the Dyrt's chief executive.
In the near term, they've taken advantage of their massive audience by asking members about their experiences and what they want. Those responses, along with findings from two separate national surveys commissioned by the Dyrt, have been pooled in a camping report whose highlights speak to the activity's meteoric rise during the pandemic. Some notable finds:
- The Dyrt reports that about 8.3 million people camped for the first time nationally in 2021; 40% of those newcomers were from Black, Indigenous or people of color communities. "Once people do it for the first time, it is just a lot more accessible," Long said.
- Going remote isn't going away: 23% of campers worked from a campsite in 2021, up from 16% pre-pandemic.
- With demand comes supply issues — as in campsite vacancies. Booking has become three times harder since 2019.
In a recent interview, Smith and Long talked in-depth about their growing "community," the data behind camping's trends and bigger dreams for the Dyrt. Their answers are edited for length and clarity.