Let's Get Modern, Ed
How about trying something with, say, welded aluminum?
– Scratch the dead guys. –
If we had followed the lead of the ancient, glacier-trudging bronze age dead we might be in better shape than we are now. Even allowing for a bit of slippage and backsliding and waiting around for one thing or another, and a few annoying minor kerfuffles, things could have been better long ago.
But we lost it all. We screwed up big time. We basically weren't paying attention, and had to learn everything over from scratch.
The soft and supple backpack frame of sapling and sinew was in our past but not our history, 'cuz we forgot. No records were kept. No notes got took. It slipped our collective mind. We got all hazy about the details until there were no longer any details to be hazy about. We spaced it.
No light frame of all natural materials that absolutely anyone could make, with a hand-tanned leather pouch hanging from it. Nothing made of bamboo, for instance. Fishing rods were made from this stuff for generations. It is light and flexible and can handle all sorts of stress and strain, but we weren't thinking about packs then. Bamboo could have been used for pack frames, and we could be using it right now, maybe improved by soaking it well in a grain-filling rot-defeating polymer. We'd have no need for fiberglass or carbon fiber, both of which are only industrial-age replicas of bamboo, would we?
No.
But we didn't and we aren't and we don't. Events yanked us ahead in time and everything from the past fell out of our heads, or we threw it away because it looked old fashioned. First we dug roots and hunted beasts. Then we milked cows and steered plows, which wasn't all that different. (Even our farm-based forebears were practical-minded physical beings, and lived close to the ground.)
And then.
– Make me pasty white, and ordinary. –
And then came the industrial revolution and we went straight to the cities and got sucked into factories, and where did that get us, finally? Indoors, in offices, squinting under artificial light, confined in carpet-lined boxes. Along the way we forgot everything we knew. Now most people are afraid to step off the pavement. They've never done it before and even the idea makes them quiver in fearful doubt.
After the tipping point which dumped us into complete domestication we became sleek and fat and conventional. No one could think of any recreational activity beyond baseball, which became something to watch, not do. We weren't having fun yet. It wasn't imaginable. A few people tried various odd things but were made examples of. (You SWEAT!?!?!? EEEEWWWWW! Why would you do THAT?)
The desire for fun developed slowly. First one person had fun outdoors and continued to live, with few if any noticeable side effects, except for good ones. Then another person tried it, with the same result. People being what they are, they don't budge from the starting line unless everyone else is already out there ahead of them. It doesn't matter what, as long as others are doing it. Then it's OK. Like tattoos on women and earrings on men. (Talk about yer eeeew factor.)
As fun in the outdoors transformed people they came to realize that they needed equipment to make it even more fun.
Somewhere in this river of time, by accident, Lloyd F. Nelson got reminded of a few basic truths and did what he could with the Trapper Nelson pack. His materials were lumber and canvas. He used lumber to clumsily give some shape to a canvas bag.
A while later someone else revised Nelson's pack by sticking in a plywood frame. This worked about the same, disadvantages included. These packs were all heavy beasts, foursquare and straight, but they worked better than what else was out there. They were tight and vertical, rigid, and did not bend, nor did they flex. Padding made them barely bearable. It was an uneasy truce between the human body and the backpack. Uneasy and barely a truce.
Backpacking as we know it didn't exist. It was marginally conceivable if at all. If they absolutely had to go out somewhere, most people stuffed things into a shapeless canvas bag and got by, somehow. Or used worse things. A few adventurous types discovered those odd new pack frames.
But earlier on some had known how to get by.
– I'll take two moccasins, one soft pack, and –
A funny name, please.
Nessmuk preferred his soft knapsack and said so. "Don't be induced to carry a pack basket. I am aware that it is in high favor all through the Northern Wilderness, and is also much used in other localities where guides and sportsmen most do congregate. But I do not like it. I admit that it will carry a loaf of bread, with tea, sugar, etc., without jamming; that bottles, crockery, and other fragile duffel is safer from breakage than in an oilcloth knapsack. But it is by no means waterproof in a rain or a splashing head sea, is more than twice as heavy - always growing heavier as it gets wetter - and I had rather have bread, tea, sugar, etc., a little jammed than watersoaked." 1
And he was wise about what he took. "As a rule, on a mountain in tramp or a canoe cruise, I do not tote canned goods. I carry my duffle in a light, pliable knapsack, and there is an aggravating antagonism between the uncompromising rims of a fruitcan, and the knobs of my vertebrae, that twenty years of practice have utterly failed to reconcile."
Remember, this was in the years when canned food was space age technology. It was even better than freeze-dried is now, that stuff that still tastes and works like dehydrated animal droppings. Obscenely expensive dehydrated animal droppings.
But Nessmuk was not above accepting offerings that a greenhorn might have voluntarily set on the altar of pain. "I often have a call to pilot some muscular young friend into the deep forest, and he usually carries a large packbasket, with a full supply of quart cans of salmon, tomatoes, peaches, etc. As in duty bound, I admonish him kindly, but firmly, on the folly of loading his young shoulders with such effeminate luxuries; often, I fear, hurting his young feelings by brusque advice. But at night, when the campfire burns brightly, and he begins to fish out his tins, the heart of the Old Woodsman relents, and I make amends by allowing him to divide the groceries."
Then as now, no matter how you approached the problem, the main idea was to keep it simple, keep weight down by doing without things you really didn't need, and by choosing the best of the rest.
"And don't neglect to take what sailors call a 'dittybag'", Nessmuk wrote. "This may be a little sack of chamois leather about 4 inches wide by 6 inches in length. Mine is before me as I write. Emptying the contents, I find it inventories as follows: A dozen hooks, four lines of six yards each, three darning needles and a few common sewing needles; a dozen buttons; sewing silk; thread, and a small ball of strong yarn for darning socks; sticking salve; a bit of shoemaker's wax; beeswax; sinkers, and a very fine file for sharpening hooks. The dittybag weighs, with contents, 2 1/2 ounces; and it goes in a small buckskin bullet pouch, which I wear almost as constantly as my hat. The pouch has a sheath strongly sewed on the back side of it, where the light hunting knife is always at hand, and it also carries a two ounce vial of fly medicine, a vial of 'pain killer,' and two or three gangs of hooks on brass wire snells. I can always go down into that pouch for a waterproof match safe, strings, compass, bits of linen and scarlet flannel (for frogging), copper tacks, and other light duffle. It is about as handy a piece of woodskit as I carry."
The few European descendants who explored North America's woods and mountains early on thought things through and were willing to learn from the land's first occupants, but they were a small minority, and the lessons they learned were in turn ignored.
– Sir, yes sir, etc. –
There was a long stretch of big, industrial wars in the time span between Nessmuk's late 19th century woodscraft and now. Subsequent waves of outdoorsmen were more influenced by industry and war than by fishing, hunting, canoeing and exploring. Their experiences amid gunfire taught them to use equipment designed for transporting weapons, ammunition and tools. When these people traveled it was by gasoline power, seldom on foot, never by horse, not at all in a bark canoe.
A truck will handle as much as you pile on it. A human will not. Humans quickly break down. But they don't know this at first. Each one of us has to learn. Inexperienced humans brought up in a world where machines do the work can be especially slow learners.
Try an experiment. Take some of these people, give them discarded military equipment, and you will find that they need a generation or two to unlearn the obvious and reinvent the true. Even longer to find beauty.
Send them out for a week of hiking and camping and they'll get the biggest bag possible, and stuff it full of anything that looks vaguely handy. You can track them by following their wake of destruction as they trample everything in sight, staggering around, pushing and pulling those gigantic packs.
This was the level of our sophistication up to 1952. Then Dick Kelty reinvented the external frame backpack.
Instead of using saplings or sawn lumber or going the current high-tech route with a plywood framesheet, Kelty, being familiar with aluminum tubing, started thinking about that. He made a leap from the high technology of pressed wood to the even higher technology of featherweight welded metal.
The story as it's told is that Kelty was familiar with the materials and tools of the aircraft industry, such as aluminum tubing, because he had worked at Lockheed during World War II as an engineer. In 1952 he tried making some new packs for his friends, using this aluminum tubing, and sold 29 packs for $24 each. He had enough friends to build enough packs to refine his technique. At that time $24 would have been half a week's pay for many people, so the packs weren't as cheap as they sound in today's dollars. 2
One version of the Kelty story tells how the hip belt originated later, as an afterthought. First the pack got designed and built, and it worked but it didn't hang quite right. It wobbled as Kelty walked, and he got tired of that, so he stuck the pack frame's bottom ends into his back pants pockets. This worked but felt odd, so he tinkered until he invented a hip belt, which did this job better. His first hip belt was plain webbing, like the stuff seatbelts are made of now, but it probably hurt after a while, because Kelty's improved and padded hip belt appeared soon. 4
The Kelty company's official history says that sales for its second year were all the way up to 90 packs. Dick Kelty hadn't quit his day job by then. He was a carpenter and remained one, for a while. In his off hours he built pack frames by hand, welding and hand-bending each and every piece. His wife Nena sewed bags to go with the frames. Despite the seeming insignificance of their first home workshop, pack technology had suddenly leapt ahead several thousand years from the deep past into the dawning future.
People caught on.
Eventually.
If brussels sprouts are cabbage with a college education, then Kelty's invention was a pack with a graduate degree. These packs developed into sophisticated creations whose contoured frames were fashioned from aircraft-grade aluminum, whose shoulder straps were expertly padded and whose hip belts were carefully engineered with high technology cam-lock buckles built right in.
Pack bags attached to their frames with clevis pins. These were easily removable for cleaning, repair, or replacement, of either the bag or the frame. Pack cloth used for the bags was a relatively new and tough miracle textile called nylon. There was no cotton in a Kelty pack. Soon Dick Kelty's packs had zippered pockets, hold-open frames, and back bands that kept the pack away from the hiker's body, providing both comfort and ventilation. 3
The Kelty Tioga, a landmark pack, appeared in 1973. As of September, 2013, it was still being sold. Its design drifted a little over the years, but not much. This pack was always a huge sucker, available in sizes up to 5500 cubic inches (90 liters!), nearly adequate to garage a small car. Some who bought a Tioga new in the 1970s kept them, and still use them. Mere decades cannot kill a Tioga.
– If that's a man's pack, can I be an elf? –
Packs weren't always big, as you know, and not all of today's packs are big either. But probably the largest practical packs in history are the modern ones. Practical, like most words, has a meaning with some flex built in. Let's say that practical means that a strong and fit man could probably carry the biggest of these packs, loaded, more than a half mile or so without a fatality (his).
(Sidenote: If you are a woman, and you are stupid, you have permission - which we are aware you do not need or want - to go ahead and do this too, although we also recognize that there is a strong chance you do not meet or care to meet both preconditions.)
Packs like this (giant packs) were developed during the latter half of the 20th century because it was possible, and because people like to do what is possible, just to prove that it is possible, regardless of worrisome constraints like sanity. Gigantic practical packs became possible because of advances in pack frame technology. (Blame Dick Kelty.)
Pack making blossomed during the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, as people grew up and became comfortable with the idea of camping and exploring the world through backpacking. Many companies suddenly exploded into existence like fireworks in a night sky, and a few remain in business, though most are no longer owned by their founders.
When the external frame pack was the Big New Thing, and while it was still groping toward its present form, other people, mostly from the climbing world, worked on frameless packs. This eventually led to both better frameless packs and to internal frame packs.
The Jensen Pack was one of the most interesting. Don Jensen designed it in the middle 1960s, to suit his own needs. It first became widely available in 1971 through a company called Rivendell Mountain Works. The Jensen pack disappeared when Rivendell did, a little later, but is once again (from 1981 through at least September, 2013) in production as a hand-made, custom item from the workshop of Eric Hardee of the resuscitated Rivendell Mountain Works in Monroe, WA. He uses the original plans too.
The Jensen is an example of clear, innovative thinking.
Its design uses the shape of the pack bag and careful loading to create a pack that mimics the rigidity of a framed pack, but with no frame in sight. Many current frameless ultralight packs use some of the same design tricks, but no one has quite caught up with the level of sophistication of this nearly half-century-old design. 5, 6, 7
The Jensen pack is constructed of three fabric tubes. Two are vertical, and run up and down the wearer's back. The third one supports those two from below, and rests on top of the pelvis and wraps around it. When these three tubes are stuffed into a rigid state they turn the pack into a solid mass. The bottom tube, generally holding the sleeping bag, provides a foundation and serves as a hip belt. The two vertical tubes carry everything else, and since each one is narrow and tall, their contents do not sag and slump down to the bottom of the wearer's back. The pack remains perky and stands straight.
– But where are we now, really? –
The Jensen may also be the only back-loading pack ever made. To load, unload, or access its contents, you have to lay it down on its front (the part that is farthest from your back as you walk), and unzip the back (the side that goes against your back). Other than that, it's pretty normal, though its shape is distinctive, a little like an upright, inflatable figure-eight whose bottom half has partly deflated.
If you want to see where other packs have gotten to, check out a catalog from any large outdoor shop, or go visit one.
There are roughly eight million different models available, give or take a billion. Instead of waxed cotton and leather you will see heavy nylon, either coated or uncoated. A few pack makers use even more trendy fabrics like the extraterrestrial Spectra or Dyneema or newer categories of materials altogether, fabrics that were first developed for racing sails.
Packs come in every size you can stand to think about, and have corresponding capacity ranges, weights, and colors. Some are mostly cylindrical in shape, some are more rectangular, and some are hard to describe - contoured, organic-looking things that seem to have evolved secretly in a quiet back garden, under the porch.
Backpacks started as bags, then got carrying straps, then frames, and then held their breath for several thousand years. Lately, despite hundreds of innovations in materials, designs, and uses, and the filling of nearly every ecological niche, packs now are sort of standard in several broad ways.
A pack fits on a person's backside, mostly. A pack has one strap for each shoulder, mostly. A pack generally has a hip belt of some kind, often big enough to be scary. A pack has external pockets, and a few places to tie things on, and maybe a few extra straps for this, that, and the other purpose. And as noted, a pack usually has a frame (unless it doesn't). A few packs have removable frames, or use some of your other gear to fill in for a frame.
So where does all this get us then? Kind of back to the beginning. Things change, and get better in some ways. But somehow we never get too far from the basics, because as always when you get the body involved, form must sleep in the same bed as function. Otherwise things do not work. Your refrigerator can be molded to resemble an avocado, if you want it that way, but a pack has to fit your backside, and feel good there.
So there's form.
If the function you need is to leave home for a while and walk, and you are trying to get by with only the things you carry, then this is backpacking, and it demands that you watch your limits. The big limit, the one that affects everything else, is weight. If your loaded pack is light enough then its design doesn't matter so much. A 50 pound (23kg) pack that is designed really well and fits you in a custom sort of way can be surprisingly comfortable for a lot longer than you would believe. Not forever, though, and if the design is off by just a bit you begin hurting a lot, quickly.
Scale down a poorly-fitting pack and cut the total weight of it, and everything inside it, to 12 pounds (5.5 kg), and you can live with it no matter what. As long as it holds together it will be OK. Maybe not great, but it won't break your bones or rip your ligaments, and that is good enough. The principle is that weight matters more than fit. The less the weight, the wider the choice of designs you can pick from, or put up with.
Imagine the pack that William Hamilton Gibson described below. Think about carrying 50 pounds with it. Then imagine carrying 15 pounds. Fifty pounds sounds like a death sentence. Fifteen pounds sounds like a quaint amusing stroll through the woods with some funky antique role-playing thrown in. The difference? It's clear, isn't it?
"For a campaign on foot, the knapsack, or shoulder-basket is an indispensable article. It should be quite large and roomy, say fifteen inches in depth and ten by twelve inches in its other dimensions. The material should be canvas, rubber cloth, or wicker, and, in any case, the opening at the top should have a water-proof covering extending well over the sides. The straps may consist of old suspender bands, fastened crosswise on the broad side of the bag. The capacity of such a knapsack is surprising, and the actual weight of luggage seems half reduced when thus carried on the shoulders." 8
As always, watch your weight and everything else will mind its own business.
– Footsie Notes –
1: Woodcraft and Camping by Nessmuk a.k.a. George Washington Sears, 1884: http://bit.ly/12Gu74t
2: From www.geartrends.com/geartrends/upload/summerout06_outdoorhistory.pdf (no longer accessible)
3: Kelty Heritage at Kelty: http://bit.ly/1abob2a
4: From www.geartrends.com/geartrends/upload/summerout06_outdoorhistory.pdf (no longer accessible)
5: Jensen Packs at Rivendell Mountain Works: http://bit.ly/1abovy0
6: History of Gear: Rivendell/Jensen from Oregon Photos: http://bit.ly/18JLXz8
7: Rivendell Mountain Works: http://www.rivendellmountainworks.com/ or http://bit.ly/2kazGG8