Sometimes stealth camping can be amazing - you see amazing things and experience total calm. Other times it sucks and you get sprayed by garden sprinklers. This was a bad time.

1am, garden sprinklers, enough said. There's a full post about stealth camping and why the bad moments on tour are actually good moments given time. If you're interested check it out here.

Thank you!

where was that? I recall that same sign about not feeding the bears from your post.

I camped in Pemberton (via sea to sky highway, BC) and the sprinklers went off at 4am, luckily I had a rain-fly on.

The sprinkler incident was near Williams Lake, BC, but you're right about the sign - Think it was just outside of Squamish!

We weren't stealth camping. We had permission to camp in a town park in a small town in Colorado. Wow the grass is nice and lush! Sprinklers came on at 2am and 5am. All we could do was laugh and go back to sleep. Found out our tent was pretty watertight.

Those pesky sprinklers just pop out of the ground and soak ya! I suppose the lesson is to be wary of grass that's suspiciously green!

The one time I had permission to sleep in a town park, and use the showers in the adjoining swim center, the people giving us permission warned us to be out by 8:00 since that was when the sprinklers were set to start up.

I once stealth camped at dusk in a small patch of trees on the edge of town. After falling asleep I was awoken but the startling sound of a huge freight train that was probably only twenty feet from where I slept. Long big trains thundered by throughout the night. I did put ear-plugs in after the first train but it was still very loud and rather disconcerting.

Haha, love that. Loud close-by train noises are the worst. I remember being in a tent in a thunderstorm in Lousiana and seeing lights growing bigger and bigger coming towards the end of the tent. Hadn't seen that the site was right next to train tracks. Really thought for a moment that I'd accidently camped on the tracks until it roared past!

don't eat in your tent.. bears can smell the food you spilled .

I've had similar thing happen in Walden, CO.

Bloody sprinklers!

I had one go off on me as I was riding past... Luckily, the only thing that got wet were my panniers!

Poor Dave!

If a bear is hungry....You ARE food. Are you going to cook food in the nude also?...

I am not totally sure how camping out in the open on municipal property, etc... qualifies as Stealth.

Suppose the stealth should've been in ""'s. It was definitely not "stealth camping", quite the opposite. Just gets draining finding a discreet sight night after night (this was around day 190 on a big tour) and this was a moment of utter sloppiness / brain failure.

I remember pulling into Lander, YW to set up for two days. There was a guy there whose buddy had wiped out bad coming into DuBois and was in the hospital. They were waiting for the wives to drive out from MN to pick them up. He told me to make sure I zipped up my rain fly if I left park. The previous day he had gone to visit his buddy in the hospital and the sprinkler system went on. The inside of his tent and everything he had in it had gotten drenched.

Something you only learn the hard way! I think if it was me, I would have given in and found a hotel for a night like that, assuming one is around of course. You are clearly much tougher than I.