Things to Avoid: Backing Up While Towing A Trailer

First day on the road, and I was already playing with fire. I’d driven from San Francisco to somewhere between Palm Desert and Joshua Tree—which sounds poetic, but really means “windy and weird, and not nearly enough gas stations.” That’s where I met my first real test: backing up my trailer, solo, into a mostly deserted RV park. Did I have a spotter? Of course not. Did I have any clue what I was doing? Absolutely not. But I was determined to prove that I could wrangle a sixteen-foot box on wheels like a seasoned pro (or at least fake it convincingly).

Backing up a trailer is a special kind of torture. It’s not driving, it’s interpretive dance—one where you lead, but the trailer is always off-beat, trying to spin into traffic or knock over a picnic table. If you’ve ever tried it alone, you know it’s a ballet of sweat, swearing, and existential dread.

Pro tip from someone who’s lived to tell the tale: If you have the chance, just don’t back up at all. Drive through, pull forward, do whatever it takes. Because backing up is a last resort—a move reserved for people who are either very confident or have no other options (guess which one I was).

Of course, if you do pull straight in, be prepared: the universe will send someone to park right in front of you, guaranteeing that the only way out is the dreaded reverse. At which point, you will remember that you have never, in your entire life, successfully backed up anything larger than a shopping cart.

Here’s what I knew about trailers: nothing. Zero. I thought, “Hey, it’s small, how hard can it be?” Reader, this is what’s known as “famous last words.”

Backing up is a skill—one you’re supposed to practice in an empty Walmart parking lot, preferably in the dead of night when nobody’s filming you for YouTube. There’s a technique, of course. Want your trailer to go left? Turn the wheel right. Want it to go right? Turn left. It’s like your brain and the trailer are in an epic, lifelong custody battle for control of the vehicle.

Here’s the trick the gods of towing don’t tell you: Put one hand at the bottom of the steering wheel, and move your hand in the direction you want the trailer to go (forget what the car wants). This works—sort of—until your instincts betray you, your hands get sweaty, and your trailer is suddenly impersonating a snake in a game of Tetris.

If you’re lucky, you won’t “jackknife”—that’s the moment when your trailer gets a little too intimate with your car’s fender. You want to avoid this. (Trust me.)

So there I was, crawling forward, backing up, overcorrecting, and repeating—again and again—until by some miracle, the trailer lined up and I collapsed in the driver’s seat, heart pounding like I’d just run a marathon in hiking boots. In the end, it’s less about perfect skill and more about looking like you meant to do it that way all along.

Bonus points if no one saw your 28 attempts. Extra bonus if you didn’t flatten anything expensive. And a gold star for every time you remember, “If I can do this, maybe I can actually survive this trip.”

Smug satisfaction unlocked. Welcome to trailer life.