The Parking Spot That Started WildRoots

The first time my girlfriend and I tried to go camping in the Ardennes, we ended up sleeping in the car in a parking lot at the edge of a forest.

We had a tent, a stove, and a rough idea of where we wanted to hike. What we did not have was a legal place to pitch that tent. Wildcamping is illegal in nearly all of Europe, with a few gray areas here and there if you know exactly where to look, and we did not know where to look yet. So we improvised. We drove into Belgium, found a quiet spot near the treeline, and spent the night in the car instead.

It should have felt like a failed trip. Instead, it was one of the best ones we had taken in years.

That day, the only things on my mind were which direction to hike, whether to push on or turn back, and getting to the car before it got dark. Whether we had packed enough food. Whether our clothes would hold up if the weather turned. None of it was dramatic. It was just the ordinary, practical stuff that used to matter to every human being who ever lived outside a house. Somewhere between checking the map and gathering wood for a small fire, I felt something I had not expected: calm and wired at the same time. Alive, in a very plain sense of the word.

We kept chasing that feeling. Every trip after that, we tried to go a little more raw, a little less equipped with comfort and a little more equipped with skill. I started learning bushcraft properly, not to survive some imagined emergency, but because knowing how to read a map, use a compass, and build a fire that actually cooks your food makes an experience real instead of performed. We are still not experts. We are just two people who found something in the Ardennes that we did not want to let go of.

Here is the problem we ran into almost immediately. Genuine nature experiences are hard to find. Most campsites in Europe are large, built for caravans and families, with amenities that turn a forest into a parking lot with wifi. If you already know exactly which trail you want to hike, finding a place to sleep along that route takes hours of scrolling through half updated tourism sites and forums. And if you do find one good spot, you then spend an evening piecing the rest together yourself, using Google Maps, blog posts, and whatever regional website still works, just to figure out what else is worth doing nearby.

I work at Bever, an outdoor retailer here in the Netherlands, and once I noticed this pattern in my own life, I started asking colleagues and customers about it too. It turned out I was far from the only one. People who genuinely wanted to get outside, to hike, camp, trek, or just disappear into a forest for a weekend, kept running into the same wall. Either they ended up at a generic campground that felt more like a resort than nature, or they gave up somewhere in the planning process because putting together a real trip took more time than the trip itself.

I think that gap matters more than it looks on the surface. Somewhere along the way, modern life convinced most of us that comfort and convenience are the point. But there is something in us that still responds to a fire, a map, a decision about which way to walk. Reconnecting with that, even for a weekend, is not a luxury. It is closer to a return to something we quietly lost.

That is why I started WildRoots. The idea is simple: one place where you can find real nature experiences, hidden campsites, guided treks, bushcraft courses, expeditions, without spending your evening stitching together five different websites to make it happen. Whether you already know the trail and just need somewhere honest to sleep, or you are starting from nothing and want the whole experience laid out for you, it should take minutes to find, not hours.

My name is Aiden Doss, I am 25 years old and (currently) living in the Netherlands, and this was the story of why I decided to build WildRoots.