My pack was, well, abysmal. Subtracting 10 pound’s worth of food, water, and stove fuel, and adding back a few pounds for essential gear I should have packed but didn’t, my sack’s “base weight” was about 36 pounds. With some better gear made of lighter materials, and a little ingenuity, I could easily get that down to an acceptable 25 pounds, Hawk told me.

Julie “had a lot of good, quality gear,” but even her pack could have used some fine-tuning. Her base weight was about 30 pounds; Hawk quickly got her down to 26 pounds by ditching some non-essentials. Were Julie to upgrade some of her gear, most notably her bulky, six-pound pack, Hawk says, she could get her base weight down to a nifty 20 pounds.

“A lot of people say, ‘I need these things.’ Then you go through and take out six ounces, they put the backpack back on, and, ‘Oh, this is lighter. What else can I take out?’ You plant the seed,” Hawk explains. “When you can reduce 10 pounds out of your pack weight, it’s just enlightenment.”

There is a cost, of course, to traveling so sprightly. A lighter pack is more expensive to assemble, and you can’t drop pounds without sacrificing some convenience and creature comforts. But less weight means less strain on your back and joints, less fatigue, and improved comfort, and certainly makes for a speedier, more enjoyable trek, be it an 80-miler or, in my case, the length of a parking lot.

What did Julie and I do right? Where’d we go wrong? More important, how can you lop pounds off your own pack without chucking the stuff you really need?

Here are Hawk’s expert tips and analysis.

THE BIG 3  The three single heaviest items a backpacker lugs are (or should be) his or her tent, sleeping bag, and backpack. “If you’re looking to reduce pack weight, those are the areas you target first because you can save pounds, not ounces,” Hawk says.

My tent, a 10-year-old Coleman Stargazer, weighed 7 pounds, 9 ounces–a real dinosaur. Julie had a 3-pound, 6-ounce Sierra Designs Light Year tent. “Not one of the lightest out there, but admirable,” Hawk says. What’s lighter than that? Hawk’s tent, a Wanderlust 2-4-2 silnylon tent, weighs a scant 2 pounds because his trekking poles double as tent poles.

Ideally, a sleeping bag should weigh about 2 pounds, which ours were close to, Hawk says. He prefers goose down, which weighs less than synthetic materials but is pricier, with a 700 fill power rating, the fluffiest around. For spring, summer, or fall hiking, shoot for a bag that’s good down to 20 degrees. Why so low? Because a bag of that rating doesn’t guarantee you’ll be comfortable at 20 degrees; it just guarantees that your body temperature won’t fall.

I scored points on my backpack–“On a scale of 1 to 10, I’d give it a 6”–but hardly deserved the credit. (The pack, a 4-pound LL Bean model, was my friend Hansi’s.) Julie, meanwhile, lost points for her big, pocket-laden 6-pound bag. A wiser choice, Hawk said, would be a silnylon pack, 3,000-cubic-inch capacity (or slightly bigger), weighing about 3 pounds. But beware: the larger the pack, the more tempted you’ll be to fill it up.

SLEEPING PAD  Julie packed a foam pad to place under her sleeping bag and use as a seat cushion. I should have done the same, Hawk says. “It’s going to add weight, but it’s a necessary item. You gotta have it, or you won’t sleep. ” A 14-ounce closed-cell foam pad, or a comparable pad under $100, will do the trick. Alas, even the best air mattresses are 50 percent heavier.

COOKWARE  I grabbed a pot from my kitchen while Julie had a titanium camping pot. No question which was better: while Julie’s titanium cost about $60, it weighed a full pound less. “They work well, they’re relatively thin so water boils that much faster, which means you burn less fuel, and they’re pretty durable,” says Hawk.

We both had mini, store-bought stoves which, combined with small propane canisters, weighed about 1-and-a-half pounds. But Hawk says that many hikers nowadays go one step further, creating makeshift stoves out of used soda cans that weigh just a few ounces. “You could go to PCTA.org. They have links there to a number of lightweight websites that provide free directions,” he said. “You could get your total cookware system down to 4 ounces. But you’d lose some convenience.”

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