Who Taught You To Pack?

AMC Outdoors, May 2008

Two backpackers learn how to go light

With each laborious step, my spine screamed from the enormous weight on my back—and I hadn’t even left the parking lot.

This, of course, was a bad sign, considering how I was competing in a “Survival of the Fittest” pack-off, and a judge armed with a postal scale was waiting for me inside, ready to weigh my overstuffed sack down to the last ounce.

It had all sounded so great when AMC Outdoors Publisher Heather Stephenson first pitched me the story: camping veteran and hiking neophyte vie to pack the lightest, most killer backpack for a four-day jaunt in the woods. It’ll be trail leader versus trail rookie, experience versus complete guesswork, with no help from friends, books, the Internet, or the tent department dude at REI.

Then Heather told me the bad news: I was the neophyte.

I had to agree that I fit the description. While I’ve done my share of day trips, it’s been eight years since I last slept in a tent. The only backpack I own is the kind that holds schoolbooks. A sleeping bag? Maybe a friend could lend me one.

My packing opponent, meanwhile, was Julie LePage, an AMC Boston Chapter hike co-leader for the past three years. When I first spoke with Julie, she was preparing to camp in the snow in the White Mountains. If she weren’t so nice, I would have sworn she was rubbing it in.

The goal was to pack as lightly and efficiently as possible in the eyes of our judge, backpack Zen master Hawk Metheny. Having polished off everything from the Appalachian Trail (2,175 miles) to the Pacific Crest Trail (2,650 miles) in his 25-year hiking career, Metheny now teaches workshops for AMC on reducing pack weight.

“There shouldn’t be anything in your pack that you didn’t use by the end of your hike, except for your rain gear if it didn’t rain and your first-aid kit if it wasn’t needed,” Hawk offers. “Everything else in your pack you should be using every day in camp. If not, why are you carrying it? Might as well have a brick in there.”

Our guidelines were as follows: plan on temperatures ranging from 35 to 75 degrees and rain showers late afternoon and evening of Day 2; count on freshwater streams near every campsite and some typical, Northeast above-treeline exposure; forget campfires and anything else not in line with Leave No Trace principles. Food and gear budget (beyond what we own): $100. Bonus points for ingenuity and homemade solutions.

Julie had everything ready to go in about an hour. I spent two days wondering what to bring, then scrambled to find a backpack, stove, and other items I didn’t possess. In the end, Hawk took us both to backpacking school.

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.”

 Who Taught You To Pack? cont'd>>