Use Me!
Backpack types by use.
– Introduction. –
There are different uses for packs. You know this. Everyone knows this. But in the interest of being tedious, we'll hash it out once again. There are packs for day hikes, for long and short backpacking trips, for various kinds of expeditions, canoeing, climbing, military games, hauling supplies, hauling game, and probably lots of things we don't want to even think about. Got a problem? There is likely a pack made for it.
– Day hikes, like mating on the wing. –
Fly fast, mate quickly, die young. Day trips are like that, and day packs are made for day trips and those who love them.
Day trips have brief life spans, like mayflies, some of the shortest-lived insects there are. Take the female American Sand Burrowing Mayfly (Dolania americana). She typically lives as an adult for less than five minutes, after spending a year or two in the water creeping around and biting things and working up to that One Big Moment.1
A good day pack is not only light and flexible but tough, and should last more than five minutes. A good day pack can outlast your trip and you too, if you show it some respect. A good start is to refrain from wearing it while swimming, bathing, sleeping, or while at formal dinner parties. If you rob banks for a living, then please leave your day pack at home. Bullet holes in any pack will seriously shorten the span of its working life. Maybe your life too, but who cares about you? We're into packs here.
A day pack can be anything from a paper bag up to a plastic bag, and beyond. Amazing but true.
Generally a day pack will be fairly small, around 2000 to 2500 cubic inches (32 to 41 L) at the high end. Small because it doesn't have to carry too much, and since each day hike is a short relationship, you don't really want to get that involved with it. A sandwich or two, some water, and the other eight essentials will do. Or if you're the right sort of hiker only the three essentials — cigarettes, beer, and cookies. Smokers can add matches, and nonsmokers can drop the cigarettes, and stick to the beer and cookies, which provide every essential element necessary for a long and healthy life, let alone a measly afternoon hike.
Some day hikes are in truth pretty gnarly. It depends on who you are and what you think you are up to. For example, would you hike the Timberline Trail around Oregon's Mt. Hood in one day? That's about 45 miles (72 km). Some people do that for one reason or another. If it's done in a day, is it a day hike, Mommy? Yep, but you don't have to do that sort of thing if you don't really want to. You can take it way easier than that, and generally you should.
The terms for foot travel vary. You may come across walking, tramping, bushwalking, hiking, rambling, trekking, scrambling, daywalking, and others. Doesn't matter. What really matters is your intent. If you plan to come home the same day and sleep in your own bed (or that of a close friend or associate) then you are day hiking.
– Big O, big K. –
Day hiking is nothing to be sneezed at, or on. It's also nothing to spill soup on, or throw things at, feed to your cat, wipe your feet on, send nasty letters to, or spread false rumors about. Day hiking is OK, with a big O and a big K. Day hiking is the basis of everything else in the hiking, backpacking, and climbing worlds. Even an eleventy thousand mile thru-hike is a bunch of day hikes stitched together with a combination of grit, determination, stick-to-it-iveness and possibly pig headed stupidity, with flies and skeeters thrown in, but still a bunch of day hikes that are related by birth and permanently roped together in a long line.
Day hiking demands that you be able to stand up and walk pretty much on your own and find your own way back home again. These are basic skills. You need them. You can't do it without them.
Day hiking means you also have to be able to stick food and water into your mouth and figure out where to go from there, and keep doing it every now and then, every day you happen to be out there. Then you have to put on your jacket, take it off again, slather bug juice or sun repellent, check for blisters, ticks, and unpleasant companions, change your socks, get out of the rain, and learn to use a long stick rather than your bare hands to check under rocks for rattlesnakes and scorpions. But if you do this last bit here's a hint — there are better ways to find friends.
Day hiking will hone skills.
These skills. Other skills. Skills in general. And.
Of course a day hike is a great excuse to buy and own a pack. Many of the packs made for day hiking are probably floating right up there near the top of the tank well above the sludge line. They tend to be smallish, styled well, not so expensive, light, handy, and to have lots of pockets and cords and straps for anyone with a fetish related to yanking on and/or tightening things.
Day packs are really the core of the market because almost everyone can day hike, and can afford a pack to do it with, so makers make them. And makers compete against one another, because they really like you, and want you to come over and buy a pack or two every now and then.
Because day packs are small you can get a whole lot of them into almost any closet around, and once you close the door no one will know exactly how many you have. Showing up at every hike with a new pack will give you a reputation as someone who really knows their stuff, so people will look up to you. Can't beat that with a stick, especially since day hiking is so easy, and because you already have the stick to look for friends with, anyway. You can appear to be a world class expert but not have to walk more than, say, five miles or so in any one day. Less if you fake it.
Day hikes, acquaintances, friends, lovers, and spouses may come and go in a flash but actual day packs can last forever. Along with the effects of snakebite, of course.
– Fear and idiots. –
Pack makers sweat big wet drops of steaming blood day and night just for you. Because they are afraid. Of you.
They are afraid of some idiot (think of a typical idiot you have met and then multiply by 7.8 billion, up from 7.01 billion when the first draft of this was written, so they're prolific too) who comes along and puts the pack on over his head and then tries to climb a big rock, or who puts a big rock into his pack and then tries to swim across a really cool foaming river, or who stuffs two cases of beer and some cookies into his pack and then goes out on a winter hike.
Manufacturers are afraid of people like that. They are afraid that you might be one, or related to one, or sit next to one at work, or have some of them play with your kids. And these aren't the really scary idiots. Believe it or not strapping a pack onto your feet and then hopping into a burning building while blindfolded isn't as bad as it gets. It gets much scarier. And manufacturers are even more afraid of those people than they are of you.
See, the deal is that people like this, the idiots (From the Latin idiota i.e., ordinary person, but now meaning a person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning. You know some, right?), are some of the most dangerous people in the world. They will not only go out and destroy their own perfectly good equipment and maim themselves in the process, but then they will come home again and start suing people like crazy because of dumb things they themselves did. Or their peevish survivors will do this if they have any encouragement at all, and just enough brains to figure out how, which they always seem to have.
And pack makers have to guard against all of this, so packs are made really well. Packs are made better than well. They are overbuilt. Severely. They are built to last and last even if some yahoo continues to fire bullets of stupidity at them day after day, week after week. Et cetera.
You follow, right? Wink, wink.
This is a good deal for you, right here at the day pack level. Because day packs are smallish, and sort of cheap because of the competition, and because of being made in China or Vietnam, or maybe on one of those little specky islands out in the South Nowhere Sea where people have nothing to do but gaze at the horizon and occasionally pound rocks together and will work for really cheap.
This is to your advantage. For bigger packs the deal isn't so good, but for day packs it is, so quit complaining.
– Backpacking — now there's something. –
Backpacking — that's the gem of outdoor experiences. Really something. Backpacking was invented way long ago, in the dim reaches of time before color TV, before whitewall tires, before steam engines, before catapults, before shoelaces, before soap, before even farm animals. Way back. Way, way back.
Why? you might ask. Because it feels so good when you stop is the answer.
That's true. Think about it. You can say you like tight shoes because it feels so good when you take them off, or you can say you like hitting yourself on the head with a hammer because it feels so good when you stop, but you won't feel good in the same way. Backpacking isn't like poking yourself in the eye with a sharp stick, or even having someone else do it for you if you haven't got the time. It's actually considerably better than that.
Backpacking is tedious, sweaty, dirty work. A lot of it is. Most of it is. Backpacking can go on forever and ever until one day you wake up from your trance and just want to stop and stand there for a while and try to figure out what's going on, and maybe you do figure it out.
Backpacking puts you out there among all the flies and other things with excess legs and unnatural appetites, and among the various other things with teeth and claws, and among windstorms, hailstorms, lightning, snow showers, rock falls, avalanches, cold, and wet evil slithering stuff that no one has named yet because the ones that see it have never come home again.
You, the backpacker, feel creaky when you get up in the morning, and have leg cramps at night that challenge you to even get to sleep, let alone sleep enough to wake up feeling creaky after even a little bit of sleep. You stink, even if you wash twice a day. You always stink. Your clothes get dirty and wear out like nobody's business. You're always hungry and can't seem to ever get to bed early enough. All of that. Even your thoughts stink.
And despite all that, backpacking still feels right. It takes you closer to where you need to be. You feel more alive and aware of everything, even if your awareness on a given day begins with a thorn in your butt when you sit down for breakfast and ends with aching, steaming, blistered, dusty feet. Even those experiences seem to have a deeper significance. Everything does somehow, and at the end of a trip you feel better, deep down somewhere. You feel like you understand things a bit better, or have had your feelers tuned to the right frequency again. You don't care so much what happens next even if it's going back to that job again. You know, that job. We've all had at least one. You may have managed to keep yours.
Backpacking doesn't compare to much of anything else in life. It can hurt a lot while you are doing it and you can get yourself involved in various dicey situations and have to go to bed hungry and slimy every now and then, and all that. And when you are done, on the way home, if you let yourself think about it for a minute you realize that it's over and you feel good. About yourself, about the trip, about life, about tomorrow. About next time. But mostly about having it over.
And maybe that's why backpacking was invented. It feels so good when you stop.
– But what do I need? Please tell me now! –
To go backpacking you need a pack. A real backpack.
You could say you need a manly pack, a real man's pack, but real men stand around in parking lots drinking beer, flexing their tattoos at each other, and throwing punches. Not even backpackers are that dumb, not even the women. Hi, girls!
So, another kind of real.
If day hiking is hiking during the day then backpacking is hiking extended past curfew. It is hiking for adults. It is hiking beyond the map of daily experiences. These are pretty loose definitions. No need to be fussy, though. We welcome everyone. Take your time. Settle in. Relax. Let your horizons expand at well below the speed of light, at whatever rate you can manage. There is plenty of room under this sky for everyone. Invent your own definitions.
Some people never go out for more than a night or two, a three-day weekend maybe. Others turn pro. That's true. The world is big enough now for professional backpackers, though the field is small. You kind of have to define your own niche as you go. These two extremes and every step in between are all fine. Backpacking is made up of so very many steps.
If you like to go out and walk as much as you can on every day of a trip, then you are doing it right. If you like to hike a few miles to some lake and set up camp, and then explore there, you are doing it right. If you do something else you are doing it right. No matter who you are or what your experience level is, you can always teach someone else a thing or two, and they can always return the favor. That's nice too. Unless one of you is a real smartass, of course. But that's why there are so many sticks lying around within reach.
Backpacking is related to day hiking and is a lot like day hiking but different. With backpacking as compared to day hiking, you have to handle the extra 90% of your life that is not walking a couple of miles and eating a sandwich. Backpacking puts more demands on you and on your equipment. You wake up every morning with bed hair. That happens not because you've been bad but because you spent the night trussed up in a bag, on the ground somewhere. Right away you know that this is a different sort of experience.
Then you have a drink of water and have to go poop. Here's hoping that you already know how to handle that. If not then go back to first grade and work your way up. We're all adults here, right? OK, then. Handle the unmentionable stuff, and you still have the whole dang day ahead of you, and most of the fun parts.
– Food in the trees, water in the dirt. –
Like breakfast.
Retrieve your food and stove and fuel from the tree tops and set up. Pull out the stove, fuel it. Whoops. Got to make sure the ground is clear. Don't want to set the world on fire for a bowl of oatmeal. Get your pot ready, full of water. Don't have any water left? Whoops again. Go get some. Since you're an ultralighter you most likely aren't carrying a filter, which means that you need to boil the water before it's safe, and then let it cool. Or throw some stuff into it and let chemistry work in your favor if you don't like the fussiness of boiling your water. All of this takes time but you eventually work it out.
You get breakfast prepared and eaten and then you wash up. You might bathe and brush your teeth and take care of that bed hair in case you meet someone on the trail who is either unexpectedly good looking or easily frightened, or both.
You don't do this on a day hike. Because you don't have to.
What you do while backpacking is to pack up all your belongings, your whole world, and put everything away for the day, so you can carry it all around on your back. You need a backpack for that. A backpack isn't any more definable than a day pack or day hiking or backpacking in general but it has to meet your needs, which are mainly staying alive and remaining reasonably comfortable for one or more nights and two or more days while carrying everything you need to keep you going.
– Huh. Never knew that. –
The first thing you notice about a backpack is that there is nothing special to notice about it.
That's why sales people were bred.
Someone long ago started with a few loud opinionated self assured air headed jerks, put them in vests, and bred them. Over the decades the line was constantly refined. Note that we said refined and didn't say improved. You can refine the rapacity and blood lust of a mosquito but you can't reasonably call it an improvement.
You can refine the ability of a sales person to home in on an unsuspecting and hopeful innocent to the joys of backpacking, and tune the sales person's antennae to the frequencies of gullibility, inexperience, and uncertainty, and specialize the ability to sniff out and destroy wallets, but these are not improvements, any more than ferret breeders whose efforts result in weasels who easily wiggle out of any pen whatsoever and go darting down the streets lunging at the throats of school children and the elderly could be said to have improved the breed.
Refined — yes. Improved — no. That's our story and we're a-stickin' to it.
Sales people will tell you what to look for and what you need and why. What you need is one or more shoulder straps attached to a bag big enough to put your stuff in. The rest is like ice cream on a stick.
What you need to look for and why you should pay attention are really things you have to learn as you go along. The main thing is the bag and the straps. Remember that, and also doubt everything you read here. That's to keep you healthy. While you're at it, learn to doubt not only everything you read but everything you hear, and everyone you meet, including yourself. If someone knows something, then doubt it, whatever it is, until you get some proof.
Watch as the sales person shows you the dozen or so zippers and the flocks of cinch straps, the swishing, whirring load lifters, and the clicking 18-position adjustable, inflatable hip belt with four on the floor and built in toenail clippers. Enjoy yourself. You may learn something, even something useful, especially if you later on decide to make your own packs. You never know what might come in handy.
But not all of it will. Not much of it really.
– Want the optional pipe wrench holders with that? –
You probably don't want zippers anywhere, or lots of heavy square pockets jutting out the sides of your pack. Or much volume either. If you're going for light weight then you will have a small load and will not need enough straps and padding to outfit a football team. You will not need much adjustment. There won't be much room in your life for buckles and runs of daisy chain webbing and tool loops. Ask yourself — really, seriously ask yourself what use you have for a cell phone pocket in the Brooks Range. (Hint — Think far northern Alaska. Think skirting the edge of death in the Arctic. And then put a cell phone over in the corner of that and stand back. How's it look then?)
What you will need is adequacy. Adequate and its cousin adequacy are words that never appear in advertising. Go look. They don't.
There are reasons for that.
Adequacy doesn't exist in the commercial world, but adequacy is pretty big in the real world. It means that you know what you need and you go for that. No more, no less. That's what you want in a backpack.
Here's what it means, this adequacy.
As noted before, you need shoulder straps and a bag. The straps attach the pack to your body so it doesn't just fall right down to the ground, and the bag holds your belongings so you can take them along. It's kind of like a community effort. The bag (let's start calling it a pack from now on) should be comfortable. It should be durable enough to do what you want for a reasonable length of time and it should not feel heavy or be painful. The pack should be easy to load and unload and it should allow you to get at the things you need during the day.
Any complaints so far?
A backpack will generally be bigger than a day pack, but like everything else we're talking about here, there is no absolute definition. You get to decide what is right for you. Better than that. You must decide. You and only you. If not, then it won't work. Simple but hard. Sorry.
Some people manage (at the right time of the year, in the right places, and with the right amount of experience behind them) to go on shortish backpacking trips with pack weights of five pounds or less, a bit over two kilograms. That's base pack weight, the weight of the pack plus everything you bring home again.
You and us, maybe not. OK, maybe you. Good luck. Get it working, then come back and show us how. We have things to learn too, but five pounds it skating on ice so thin that it's merely theoretical.
– A good morning stuffing. –
A good backpack will allow you to stuff it full in the morning and arrange your things inside in a pleasant and reasonable sort of way that will preserve them. (You don't want to destroy your sleeping bag or shelter, do you?) The backpack will allow you to do this stuffing and loading and arranging fairly easily. It will have some way for you to tighten everything down when you are carrying a small load, and will expand a bit for larger loads. It will have some arrangement for keeping small things easily get-at-able but won't be fussy about it or make it too complicated. The good backpack will have a way for you to deal with sudden changes of weather. This might be an opening or flap at the top (extension collar) or some kind of strap or pocket or pouch for holding rain wear. The pack will be easy to load, easy to put on, easy to take off, easy to adjust, and easy to unload again in the evening.
One more time — there is no strict definition of any of this, and there is no one backpack that does everything right all the time under all conditions, even for one person. The main thing is that whatever pack you have is pretty good for you. In a day pack you need a way to carry some food and water, a jacket, and the other necessary odds and ends. In a backpack you need a way to carry your personal ecosystem.
The backpack can be externally framed, internally framed, or frameless. It might load from the top (top loader) or from the front (panel loader or front loader, the front being the side farthest from your back). It might have built in pockets, no pockets, or detachable pockets. It might have an extension collar (an expandable area at the top) or not. It might be made of extremely expensive and hard to get fabrics, or of ordinary nylon ripstop, or even canvas. It might be made by a multi-national corporation, by a boutique maker, or by you or a friend of yours. It might be brightly colored or drab and stealthy.
Any of the above are OK.
For an ultralight pack, for trips of up to a week, you could expect a pack to weigh from less than a pound up to maybe two and a half pounds (12 to 40 ounces or 340 to 1134 g). It may have stiffeners of fiberglass or carbon fiber to simulate a full frame, or it may use a sleeping pad for rigidity. It may have a waist belt (a simple webbing strap, more for stability than support) or a light hip belt, or nothing. It will probably have external pockets made of mesh, and an extra strap or two to lash things down with. Most ultralight packs are top loaders. Most packs are. It's easy to keep the contents in a thing shaped like a bag, and bags are easy to make and to work with, and to understand.
There are endless variations on these themes and we'll get to them as we continue our journey.
– Expeditions. –
Most any catalog or online store will tell you that an expedition ranges anywhere from one week to a lifetime, and that you need a huge and heavy pack for it. If you come face to face with an actual live salesperson you will get the party line from someone who probably never went much beyond the parking lot without a Sport Utility Vehicle. (Nice phrase. Vrooom!) Expeditions are scary. Expeditions are big. Expeditions are expensive and require equipment piles of gigantic proportions and expense.
Go for it then.
As backpacking is to day hiking, so expeditions are to backpacking. In other words, the step up is really a step out. There is not much difference between a longer trip and a shorter one than the length. If you want, you can carry everything you need for a week of backpacking in pleasant and dry weather and still come in at under 25 pounds (11 kg) at the start. Easily. Going out unsupported for two weeks is harder because you have to carry food for two weeks, which kind of hurts.
But that's most of it, right there. Period.
If you are out longer you will have to be ready for a bigger variety of weather conditions, and will need more soap and fuel and bug juice. Maybe an extra battery for the camera and an additional band-aid or two, just in case. Let's see then, anything else? Hmmm, nope.
Aside from food.
– Bite me. –
Food is heavy even if you take light food. Figure 1.25 pounds per day on the light end (using high-fat food to keep the weight down), two pounds a day on the high end, or 1.5 pounds a day in the middle. That's 8.75 to 14 pounds (4 to 6 kg) a week. Double it for a second week and you might be carrying 28 pounds of food when you start out. That does hurt. Round off with additional fuel and other consumables and let's call it 30 pounds, tops (14 kg).
OK, it hurts even in metric.
The good news is that you can still handle this with a light pack. You don't need a buddy driving along behind you in a six ton half-track with machine gun turrets, barrels of water, shiny steel propane cylinders, medical staff, and blinking lights. You also don't need an eight pound $500 pack. Chances are that you can use one pack for two day, one-night trips, and use the same pack for 14 day outings. It is likely to hurt a bit though, at first, on the long trips, because of all the food.
If the standard pack you use has no hip belt, then you are going to get a pack with one one as soon as you find your way home again. If you have a slightly heavier pack, one that empty is still a marvel of lightness and clever yet simple and efficient design, then you will use that for pretty much everything. You will learn as you go because you are smart and sensible and a backpacker. Backpackers are like that. By the time you begin having hot dreams about the X-Ped-Iton™ Mark VI Pro-Level Three-Tone, Competition-Model Forever-Pack with racing flaps and built in soft drink dispenser, you will have done short trips and medium length trips and longish trips and you will know pretty much who you are and what you actually need, and how important racing flaps truly are.
And what you actually need will be...definitely something with a serviceable hip belt, and maybe even a light internal frame. But you are free to choose whatever you want. A Kelty Cloud 5250 at $800, made entirely of 100% Spectra fabric, weighing 71 ounces (2 kg) or a Gossamergear Mariposa at 18 ounces (520 g) and $75. They both work. So do many others you can buy.
Or go ahead and make your own.
If you are climbing Mount Ever-So-High then you are out of scope. You are not a backpacker anymore. You are a mountain climber.
If you are trekking all of Asia then you are not really backpacking as we mean it here. Instead, look for luggage. If you do this other sort of backpacking, you will want to carry a pack that you can sort of carry but not one that is made to be carried all day, every day, on your back. You will want a pack that can be thrown across international boundaries by those trained in the arts of luggage destruction. This is not our kind of backpacking, even though it is called backpacking. You are not us. You are tourists. We are not you.
If you are doing a long backpacking trip you are doing a long backpacking trip. If you want to call it an expedition then go ahead. Or not. But don't get too wound up in ideas related to big muscles, macho fantasies, machetes, and firearms. Backpackers walk, and stop to eat on the trail, and wash, and then sleep overnight and do some more walking.
Eat, Sleep, Hike — You can handle that with a little common sense, and so can most any pack that you can stand to wear for three or four days in a row. You do not need a license, or permission from an expert. You do not need to be certified. You are OK there. Relax.
Are we clear?
– Climbing. –
Packs for climbers are not packs for backpackers. Climbing packs tend to be especially durable. If you spend significant amounts of time stuffing your pack full of metal things, then dragging that pack over sharp rocks and tossing it around, you need a rugged pack. A climbing pack.
You probably also want the smallest one you can get away with, one without too many protuberances. Think smooth. Smooth and small and tough, with places to tie things on. With a place to attach crampons and ice axes. OK.
These packs will work for backpacking but their rugged construction will mean that they are heavier than you need for backpacking. McHale uses the acronym SARC (Super Alpine Rocksac) for some of their alpine packs. How many rocks do you intend to carry? Make that decision up front, before you go.
Since climbing is a whole separate subject way off the scale for most backpackers, we'll leave it there. As always, do what is best for you.
– Other. –
As always, to repeat a phrase, there are other specialty packs. If you are in the military, or used to be, you might want to retain those feelings. Get an ALICE pack. ALICE is the All Purpose Lightweight Individual Carrying Equipment pack made for two types of load — the fighting load and the existence load and for all environments. 2
Very few backpackers fight, even when sober, or travel through all environments though they do tend to try maintaining existence. Depending on the model, one of these ALICE packs will come in at seven to 10 pounds (3 to 4.5 kg).
Empty.
Yes'm. Scary, isn't it?
If you work for the Forest Service or do volunteer trail maintenance you might want a pack to carry tools. This sort of use is a kissing cousin to military service. Likewise for hauling dead animals if you are a hunter. Nothing wrong with that, but again it's pretty well outside the realms of lightweight and ultralight backpacking.
Canoeists are in another separate world. There is nothing so pleasant as pulling into a camp site reachable only by water, miles from any road, miles from any house, and hauling out 75 pounds of food, wine, linen tablecloths, folding furniture, and any accessories needed to turn the place into a world class restaurant. Pleasant as long as the canoe carries them and not your back. You may have everything stuffed into Duluth packs or in baskets or boxes or into something else again, but at least it doesn't have to go on your back.
That's the difference.
– Footsie Notes –
1: The American Sand Burrowing Mayfly Dolania americana from South Carolina Department of Natural Resources: http://bit.ly/1AXUMpC
2: ALICE pack: http://bit.ly/1sg1tOu