The Perseids peak the night of August 12 into the 13th, and this year the moon is new. A dark, moonless sky turns an ordinary annual shower into the best watching in years. All you have to do is get away from the light and stay up.
From a genuinely dark site the Perseids run to about 100 meteors an hour in the hours after midnight, with no telescope or binoculars needed, according to the American Meteor Society. The meteors come off the debris trail of comet Swift-Tuttle and streak out of the northeast, but they cross the whole sky, so there is no radiant to hunt for.
Darkness is the only variable you control. The new moon removes moonlight, and the rest is light pollution, which distance fixes. The darkest ground in the country is public land, most of it BLM and national forest, and August is prime season to be out on it. Point the rig at a dispersed site well away from the nearest city dome: the empty basins of central Nevada, Utah's San Rafael Swell, the high desert of eastern Oregon, the far corners of the Mojave. Check a light-pollution map before you commit, and pick a camp with an open view to the north and east.
Get clear of any direct light, kill the headlamps, and give your eyes 20 to 30 minutes to adjust, since one look at a phone starts the clock over. Lie back so you can take in as much sky as possible and let it come. Rates build after midnight and peak in the last hour or two before dawn. Desert and high-country nights cool off hard even in August, so bring more layers than the daytime heat suggests, and carry a red flashlight to keep your night vision.
The date is set and the moon is out of the way. Find dark ground, get there before the show, and stay up.