Sure, once upon a time there was Pocketmail. Nice enough for its day, but a lot like sending a postcard to Aunt Millie. If the batteries hadn't died. And you could find a phone booth so you could use it as a dialup modem.
Fussy. Technically Limited. Uncertain. Just to send plain text email.
Well, we're beyond that now.
We've had cell phones for a good while, and there's no surprise anymore about all phones having cameras. Even art school grads from Texas can hit the PCT, assign one hip-belt pouch to an iProduct, and carry along the processing power of a 1990s-era mainframe for a total weight penalty of less than 120 grams.
Like for instance, a wedding photographer took his phone to Italy, along with a $1.99 app. With that and only that he created a travel book.
OK, that's where we are. Where do we go next?
Good you asked.
You've heard of Patazonia.com, the world's biggest online seller of everything hiker-related? Sure you have.
Everyone has by now.
They've shipped you replacement boot laces and bags of trail nibbles for quite a while, undercutting just about everyone and revolutionizing the business via easy clicks and free shipping. We've all got rooms full of their stuff and can't imagine how life on the trail could be better.
Well hey - once again they're way ahead of us.
Patazonia.com has just introduced the Treadle. It's a sort of tablet computer, but way beyond the iPhone or iPad, let alone the long-defunct Pocketmail. And at $199.99, it's pretty cheap. As these things go.
Amazing, really. It's like Star-Trek's holodeck with a replicator attachment built in.
Here's how the magic happens...
After buying a Treadle device from Patazonia.com, just use your credit or debit card to pay for any section of any hiking trail you fancy. This is automagically downloaded to your Treadle, and after that you can use it anywhere, anytime it's convenient for you.
While waiting for a bus.
During your lunch break.
While mowing the lawn.
Walking down a long corridor toward another stupid meeting.
In that garbage-strewn park next to the tracks, the only nearby place you could go walking. Until now.
It's your call, and it's cheap.
Pull down the goggles, punch play, and in an instant you're stomping through the La Garita Wilderness between Lake City and Salida, with or without the commentary on landmarks and history. You get a full-color 3-D experience and even hear the crunch of your boots as you pass through fragrant forests.
Time to stop for the night? Easy.
Just sit down and enjoy one of Patazonia.com's tastyfull Sens-O-Ramen freeze-dried meals ($1.99 each, 12-second download), then pop into your choice of shelters for a good night's sleep.
Myself, I prefer the ultralight single-wall Shires model from TorporTent. You know - the one with the round Hobbit-windows. (Also $1.99.) But you can get just about anything from Patazonia.com's vast catalog. And with any decent signal at all, the download is almost instantaneous.
Be up with the sun the next morning, have a hot shower, and hop instantly from the Continental Divide Trail to your favorite section of the Appalachian Trail, then somewhere else again. Like over to Maggie's Riffle. (One of my favorite places.)
It's simple, quick, and way cheaper than buying real equipment you have to store and maintain. No rude and tedious airline travel. No actual bugs unless you add the Li'l Nippers Pak. (True, only $0.99, but most of us pass on that one - why bother when you can stay 100% virtual?)
Keep your credit card up to date, stay within the Patazonia.com Terms of Service, and you should be OK. Though a few customers have reported seeing their Treadles wiped and their accounts closed without warning.
If you're lucky, and this does happen to you (probably not, but just sayin'), you find yourself once again home and safe in your living room, and still fully clothed.
Unlike Aksel Bjorklund, who found himself no longer in the woods but suddenly surrounded by traffic, in his underwear, vacantly gazing at the sky and making chewing motions with his (now empty) mouth.
Mr Bjorklund, who insists he did nothing other than to stop for lunch at a particularly fetching overlook along the Te Araroa Trail, suddenly had his account yanked by Patazonia.com, which replied to his query only with:
...We have found your account is directly related to another which has been previously closed for abuse of our policies. Please know that any attempt to open a new account will meet with the same action...
Mr Bjorklund did know a famous blogger who publicized the incident, and shortly thereafter, following a high level of viral negativity, the account was suddenly re-established, again without explanation or notice.
But a bit later neighbors saw Mr Bjorklund removed from his home by what appeared to be police, and he hasn't been seen since.
On the other hand, most of us will never have any problem at all with one of Patazonia.com's Treadles, our downloaded apps, or SWAT teams. And it's so, so easy.
For example, if you sit down for supper and accidentally get a bowl of rabid mice instead of beef stew? Simple. Just delete them and contact customer service for a possible refund, and maybe medical attention. What could be more convenient?
What Backpacks Are Made Of, Part 2: March Of The Doodads.
– Now Hear This: Doodads are required by law. –
Yeah, like you believe that.
You might have one of those little wiggly plastic Hawaiian dolls in the back window of your car, or a bobblehead Bug Eyed Earl.1 Or, for traditionalists, the hanging fuzzy dice. And each can make a person's life so, so rewarding.
But you don't need them.
You are not required to have any of them. In fact you can do all your driving with a plain car, and all your backpacking without cup holders.
You can hike with only a duffel bag perched on your shoulder the way Emma Gatewood did. She was the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, and the first person to do it three times. She didn't even start her backpacking career until she was 57, and did without frills like tents and stoves. So it's nice to keep things in perspective. Emma Gatewood was not a weenie and you do not have to be one, unless you actually choose that option.
But having pack accessories like a frame, shoulder straps, pockets, compression straps, and cinchers, and so on, can be handy, so here we go. Let's look at them.
– Firm yourself up with a frame. –
Frames are nice and evil. Not nice and also evil at the same time but nice overall except for the evil parts.
A frame gives your pack some place to hang out, a set of rules to live by, even a reason to live when you aren't there to keep it shaped up and stuffed with your things, stroking it occasionally and murmuring gentle encouragements.
That is nice, the frame thing. The stroking part, well, don't tell and we won't ask. And it's also nice (the frame) because frames are intermediaries. A frame translates between what the pack wants to do and what your body wants to do. It's a buffer, the frame is, taming the mismatch between organic lumpy you, and inert lumpy Mr Pack.
Or Ms. Pack. Works either way.
Now for the evil bits.
The evil is that a frame doesn't do anything else besides the one thing, which is to be a frame. A frame is never un-framey.
You can't keep water in a frame, or eat a frame when your food runs low. The frame doesn't get lighter as you use it up during your trip. And you can't use a frame to wootle a slightly melancholy but ultimately reassuring and uplifting happy tune, as you could if it converted into a bamboo flute. But maybe you aren't the wootling kind anyway.
A frame is only a place to hang your pack. Single use is bad in lightweight backpacking. Everything you take should have more than one use. More than two if you can manage it. The more functions you can make a thing serve, the more gold stars you get, so...
Too bad.
Get over it. If your pack has a frame you are stuck with it.
Your pack frame is most likely made of an aluminum alloy. Aluminum is pretty light, pretty cheap, fairly stiff, yet fairly flexible. You can bend the stay of an internal frame into the shape your back needs in order to feel comfy. If your pack frame is external and made of welded tubing, then aluminum is good for that too. Aluminum doesn't rust, and corrodes only under duress. It can be welded and stay welded. It is cheap and pretty light. It is a well-understood material, so it gets used.
A pack frame may also be a fiberglass, carbon fiber, or aluminum hoop, or a pair of rods, hollow or not, that run vertically. If aluminum, this sketchy type of frame is usually adjustable for fit (by bending). Many internal-frame packs use an aluminum alloy shaped into two long flat slats. Very bendy. Manufacturers are clever and this kind of frame can come in a variety of shapes, but it is still pretty minimal, though it can be combined with another kind of frame or with compression to make a hybrid frame.
Framesheets are currently popular.
A framesheet is a frame in sheet form. (Extreme duh moment, right? I mean, you ought to remember this from earlier.)
High density polyethylene is favored for framesheets. (You can also say "frame sheets" if you prefer. S'OK.)
It (high density polyethylene) is light, rot proof, and cheap to make. But not adjustable. A pack with a framesheet is like a pack built around a board. The framesheet is big, rigid, and solid. Some makers stay with that concept and others come up with alternate shapes that look like the letters X or Y, in attempts at making an internal frame work better. Some of these frames or framesheets have multiple attachment points so shoulder straps and hip belts can be adjusted for different body sizes. They also use various alternate plastics besides polyethylene, but the basic ideas are the same.
No matter what, you still can't eat it.
Also, the frame, of whatever kind, is still a single function item.
– Strap me in, Scotty, by the shoulders if possible. –
Strap Type One:Shoulder straps.
What can you say? Gotta have 'em.
Please to excuse us please if we keep repeating some things, but it happens to be fun. And fills space. Now back to the show...
There are basically two varieties of shoulder straps. Very light, usually frameless packs have a tradition of using short straight shoulder straps. The top ends of these straps are sewn straight into the top of the pack bag with some sort of reinforcing anchor so the strap doesn't rip out right away. (Yes, to be extremely tedious, this has all appeared a few pages back, but I hope someone will decide to pay me by the word so kick back a notch and chill out for once.)
External frame packs usually have the shoulder straps attaching directly to the frame up near your shoulders. This is a similar technique but more industrial-looking. A grommet in the strap and a clevis pin connect each strap directly to the metal frame, which is something only this frame style allows.
And the other variety of shoulder strap is...not straight!
Internal frame packs normally attach shoulder straps to the upper middle area of the pack's back side, about where your own shoulder blades are. These straps almost always follow an S curve. This curve first routes the straps up to the shoulders, over them, then around your neck, and finally back outboard toward their rendezvous with anchor points at the pack's bottom where they do things that you can't watch. This double curve makes the strap fit the body's contours better, makes room for your neck, and helps keep the straps from sliding off your shoulders, something that straight shoulder straps will do whenever they get a chance.
– Tough and rugged yet cushy and cuddly. –
Most shoulder straps are padded. If you've never really appreciated this then you will about eight seconds after you decide to try out unpadded straps.
A few very light packs have offered "hollow" shoulder straps that allow the in-stuffing of spare socks, moss, dirt, stray fuzzy animals, roadkill, or whatever you can find that looks remotely like padding.
Nothing doesn't work. Go ahead and try. A fabric pocket full of nothing simply twists into a bunch, a shape that efficiently saws through your flesh and will try its best to eat your collar bones as well. You need some stiffening to make a shoulder strap work, and enough padding to prevent endless hours of annoying, unamusing agony. The kind of agony that's like a toothache in your shoulders. The kind of agony that will make you crazy in five minutes, homicidal in 10, and suicidal in 11. Don't go there.
Solved for most: Normal shoulder straps come with synthetic foam padding sewn in so you'll never know the horror of trying to go without. So unless you do exploratory surgery on your pack you'll never really know what is in there, but you won't care either, as long as it works.
If your pack is very light, the fabric used for the shoulder straps will be heavier fabric than the pack bag, normally anyway. Heavier fabric handles wear and tear, and abrasion. Get dusty, or get the straps dusty, and every time you slide the straps around it's like sanding them. Tough fabric works. On the other hand, pack bags made of very light fabric work because you can exercise care in handling the pack as a whole, but shoulder straps get rubbed and twisted and yanked on all day, every day, so even if your pack is so light that it's little more than an idea, its shoulder straps will still require relative sturdiness.
A lot of shoulder straps have mesh or absorbent fabric on the side contacting your body, to provide comfort through breathability. You may or may not care and they may or may not help you much. It's another personal thing. Unless you have an external frame pack that holds the whole pack away from your body, you will do about a thousand times more sweating on your back than anywhere else, and shoulder strap technology will not keep sweat stains from appearing all up and down your backside. No matter what, you will attract dark, ominous, and ravenous clouds of bugs everywhere you go, and the bugs will always be worse than damp shoulders. Or a damp backside.
– When in doubt, add more straps. –
Speaking of straps in general, this is one thing pack makers do best. Pack makers love straps. Vertical ones, horizontal ones, angled ones, external ones, internal ones. Narrow ones, wide ones. Some straps have their own secondary straps, for obtuse and inscrutable potential adjustment purposes you will never be able to understand. Depending on the pack design these straps may be useful, or may simply be more heavy doodads that require more pages in the owner's manual that you never get around to reading.
Strap Type Two:Shoulder strap adjusters. Shoulder straps you need. We get that. The big mooshy, padded top part of each shoulder strap, the part that actually goes over your shoulder, that attaches to the pack's bottom by way of another, thinner connecting strap that runs along your rib cage and passes by your hips? You needs it. In fact two of them, one for each side. (You needs 'em.) They are adjustable. At the bottom end. Via shoulder strap adjusters. Fine.
Strap Type Three:Load levelers. No, we simply couldn't let it go at only one or two kinds, believe it or not, and this third kind of strap also has a use in some cases.
Called the load leveler in country A, these may also be called load lifters, load adjusters, load balancers, or balance straps in countries B, D, D, E. (Or used interchangeably and randomly.) They connect the point on the shoulder strap at the top of your shoulder to the top of the pack.
Why, God? Why oh why? Why more straps? What could they possibly do? Please end this agony of not knowing. Tell us!
Easy. Pull on these load levelers to cinch the pack up close to your body, or loosen them to let the pack angle back.
Huh.
You'll find a personal setting, and fiddle with it only if the pack radically grows or shrinks in volume, or weight. These straps are useful if you want to let the pack drift away from your back where the trail is level and smooth and the day is hot. You can get some cooling air in to your back. (Note: They're used almost exclusively for framed packs whose frames are not external.)
Load levelers are also good for those times when your load is a little unbalanced, side to side. Usually you'll adjust the overall shoulder strap length at their bottom anchors. But load levelers are handy to tweak your balance while moving, short of stopping for major readjustments like shoulder strap length or actual repacking of the entire pack bag.
Super ultra light packs with straight shoulder straps don't come with load levelers. These packs are stripped to the bone, and the small weights they carry don't normally require adjustment. If you are desperately unbalanced, and using a light pack, it's time to dump out the contents and try loading it again. Not likely. But if you really truly do have this kind of problem with a light pack, it's usually because you are stupid, and straps can help there, because they'll keep you preoccupied and off the trails.
– More? Oh, yes. –
Strap Type Four:Compression. These can be either really useful (if the pack is built around compression) or mere decoration (if the straps only give token tightening options). Compression can be vertical or horizontal, or can go both ways.
Vertical compression is pretty well confined to the pack's top end where there's a flap or expansion collar to close down and cinch tight. But most compression is horizontal or circumferential, going around the pack at a constant altitude. This keeps all things inside the pack squeezed nice and tight. Circumferential compression lets the pack's volume swell or shrink as needed while keeping it rigid. This is useful.
If you need it. Otherwise not, eh?
– Dr Dingus's Amazing Expando Thingy. –
Otherwise known as an expansion collar or an extension collar.
Yes, we're doing this one more time, until we all get it.
Some packs have a big pocket up on top, and a zipper on that, and you can keep things there, and if so the whole shebang operates like a big lid on top of the pack bag. Or like a built-in purse. That's OK.
But we are more interested in smaller, lighter, simpler packs, and most of them, when you get to the top, have a drawstring. And perhaps an option to roll it up and fasten it with a bit of velcro. Or maybe a lightweight flap. Think of a stuff sack.
But think mostly of puckering.
When this top part of the pack is extra high, like another 10 or 12 inches (25 to 30 cm) above the top of the pack bag, you have, in fact, an expansion collar.
These expansion/extension collars are useful early in a trip when you have lots of food and fuel, and need some extra space. Or when facing tough weather, and need to carry extra clothing. Just carry more by extending the load up higher, and then later roll the fabric back down as your consumables get et. (Eated?)
Problem: The pack loses some of its structural integrity with an expansion collar — you can't really get a pack drum tight when it has this big flappy sort of additional empty-closet thing on top, one with a giant hole in its middle. No matter how many velcro straps you have up there, its structural integrity will win no awards.
But the extra room can be handy. Especially if you're a slob and don't plan. But you'd be happier with a big heavy pack if that's the kind of person you are.
Not saying anything. Not judging here. Just remember that option.
Front loaders (panel loaders) don't usually have an expansion collar, though if you design and make your own gear you can have it both ways. You can even make the whole pack look like a teddy bear if you want. A pink one. It's cool. It's all cool. Hike your own hike and like that. Bunny rabbit packs are nice too. I think I have six of them now.
– Pockets. Hey kids, let's have fun with pockets! –
Pockets are essential, if you're that kind of backpacker. If not, try it for a while.
Pockets turn a pack into an appliance. With pockets you are no longer a beast of burden carrying a featureless locked wad. You enter into a dialog with your pack, and the two of you converse all day as equals.
Many climbing packs brag about their lack of external pockets. Or at least their makers do. Climbers don't want pockets hanging up on things. Climbers live on danger and testosterone. We understand. Backpackers burn off their testosterone in the first day or two, and become increasingly skittish about danger the longer they manage to remain alive.
Because backpackers do expect to come back alive. Backpackers do not much care about making one glorious fireworks-filled push toward glory. Backpackers stay very, very near ground level. Backpackers live on the trail, sometimes for months, and they need things handy. All the time. Every day. In order for them not to die. They really like the not-dying part of backpacking. As a backpacker, you may not get invited to many parties, but you'll still do way much better than even the best dead backpackers. Keep that in mind.
If you ever carry doohickies, doojiggers, gadgets, gimmicks, gizmos, gubbins, thingamabobs, thingamajigs, thingummies, whatchamacallits, whatsises, widgets, toys, tokens, amulets, or nose drops, you want a pack with pockets. Pockets are great for many things, including all of the above, and more.
Where else would you keep your lint collection?
Pockets these days are mesh. Oh so many are.
In the olden days when frame packs were king, when "hiking clothes" meant jeans and a T-shirt, when footwear was nine-inch-high oiled leather boots, and cook sets were steel, then pockets were made of the same fabric as the pack bag, and they closed up tight with large steel zippers that had brass teeth like chisels.
Pockets these days are mesh, held closed by elastic. Pockets these days also lie tight against the pack's body, so you can just about squeeze in a small hankie with help from a friend who has a pry bar. Or maybe you can get a candy bar in, if it's a warm day and you don't mind smooshed soft chocolate. Mesh lets you see what is in the pocket, and as so many people say, you can put wet things into a mesh pocket and let them dry as you hike. Unfortunately, most people are idiots.
The drying never happens. Because if you get something wet and then wad it up, even if one side of it is exposed to air, it won't dry. Not in one lifetime. Possibly not in two.
OK, but mesh looks cool.
Yes.
But.
On some very light packs the pockets are solid fabric because solid fabric is lighter than mesh, which is, in turn, relatively heavy. (This is true!) If you make your own pack you can do whatever works. Solid fabric is stronger, unless you get really heavy mesh, but heavy mesh is even heavier, and solid fabric doesn't snag on twigs or thorns like mesh, which is made for snagging. (mesh, noun: Something that snares or entraps.)
Packs with pockets, especially packs for long distance or light hikers, are pimped as having at least one water bottle pocket. This pocket is set up so you can reach back and get at the bottle while walking. Sounds great, very efficient and all, but what you might enjoy more is actually stopping for a couple of minutes and taking the damn pack off your back, and then having a decent drink of water. Just a thought.
And hey — did you ever look at one of those "water bottle pockets"? They're cut low, so the top half or two-thirds of the bottle sticks out, and is easy to grab, but which also means your precious water bottle can jump out at any time at all, run away, and hide where you'll never find it.
Anyway, what is it about backpacking that's supposed to be efficient? Backpacking is the exact opposite, innit?
– Useful is good and true. Useful is OK. –
Pockets, OK. But be sure that any pockets on your pack are really useful.
Unless you get an external frame pack you'll likely find that external pockets are made of mesh (Mesh again!) strung tight. So tight. Maybe even spray-painted on. This looks really good in a store, and keeps the mesh from flapping around and hanging up on things all the time, but it means that the pocket is going to be good only for looking at, or for small, flat things. Really flat things. Really small, thin, flat things. Is that what you want, or would you expect to put actual three dimensional hiker-useful objects into those pockets?
Like food.
Think about it that once. Twice.
One handy move is to break out the day's food before leaving camp in the morning, and keep that food, along with your cook kit, fuel, and stove, outside the pack, in a pocket. When you stop to eat you can get down to business right away without unpacking anything but the food, fuel, and cook kit.
Likewise for a wind shell, gloves, and a warm hat in cool breezy weather, or for your rain wear on a showery day. Keep rain wear inside your pack and you'll get wet while digging it out, and get rain in your pack too. Pockets are great for this, but small, tight pockets are almost useless. Because they don't actually have room for anything except good looks.
– You supply the butt crack, we'll do the rest. –
Last item:Trail tool belts.
Some pack makers provide extra pockets on the hip belt, or they provide pockets as options that you can stick on the hip belt. These are great for small cameras, small snacks, sunglasses, lip balm, other diminutive but useful things. These pockets are usually proprietary to a particular brand of pack. As with everything else, you need to gain experience and decide what works, for you. The more little pockets and hideaways you have, the more complicated your pack gets, and the heavier it gets. And the more expensiver.
Say you use these pockets and get everything sorted out. Then you hike. Then after a while you can't remember what went into which pocket. Or whether you forgot something at home.
But there is room to play here.
Imagine a belt. Imagine a collection of pockets that go with that belt. Depending on what you want you mix and match. Pull out the belt, select the right pockets to go with it, and take that out on a day hike. No weight on your shoulders, no sweat on your back. Versatile, adjustable.
Say that belt goes with your pack, normally, but is removable. Then you can use the pack with or without this hip belt, and use the hip belt alone, with a few pockets, as a light day pack. Wear it around your waist, or over one shoulder.
From: Dave Stone, PorqTent International Date: Monday 10 Apr 2017 11:04am To: Melissa Nichals, Events Manager, Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Subject: R.S.V.P.
Thank you for your kind invitation to the Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Summer Trade Show.
We at PorqTent are quite pleased to accept, especially since we are such a small manufacturer (just me and my Registered Burgundian Swine Jacqueline at the moment).
We hope to spread the news about not only our innovative backpacking shelters but also about the many positive benefits of hiking with pigs (or "PorkPacking" as I like to call it).
Regards, Dave.
From: Melissa Nichals, Events Manager, Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Date: Tuesday 11 Apr 2017 3:14 pm To: Dave Stone, PorqTent International Subject: R.S.V.P.
Dear Mr Stone: We at Outdoors Retailer, Inc., the world's leading recreational trade show host, serve a wide variety of small, medium, and large manufacturers and suppliers in the Outdoor Recreation Field, with two trade shows per year.
However, a quick look at our records does not indicate that your company will be one of our exhibitors. In fact it appears that "PorqTent International" does not have an account with us.
If this is an error on our part, I apologize, but we are unable to respond to you any further at this time. Please refer to your account number in any subsequent communication.
Very truly yours,
Melissa Nichals
From: Dave Stone, PorqTent International Date: Wednesday 12 Apr 2017 3:10pm To: Melissa Nichals, Events Manager, Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Subject: R.S.V.P.
Dear Melissa,
Thank you for your kind reply. I found out about the trade show while reading a copy of Backpacker magazine at the library. The article said that the Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Summer Trade Show is a big event, with invitations going out to all the top makers of backpacking equipment, so I assumed this meant PorqTent International.
Since I pay taxes to support the library, which has a subscription to Backpacker magazine, which I in turn read faithfully, this should qualify me, as Backpacker magazine obviously supports Outdoors Retailer, Inc. by its coverage.
QED.
Please forward details about which hotel you will be putting me up in while in Denver, and the available menu options for Jacqueline (she has a sensitive stomach).
I don't mean to belabor the obvious, but our hotel room must have twin beds. I'm sure you understand that although we are close, our relationship is purely professional.
Regards, Dave.
From: Melissa Nichals, Events Manager, Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Date: Thursday 13 Apr 2017 9:15 am To: Dave Stone, PorqTent International Subject: R.S.V.P.
Dear Mr Stone:
Excuse me, but I feel I must get this straightened out immediately. Our membership rolls do not have any record of a PorqTent International, or of a Dave Stone.
Outdoors Retailer, Inc. is a private association, and attendance at any and all Outdoors Retailer, Inc. trade shows is contingent upon membership. Space is also limited.
We appreciate your interest, but unless you are a paid member in good standing and are registered in advance, you will not be able to even enter the show pavilion. Display space has already been allocated for this year, though you may still apply for membership and consider exhibiting next year.
Outdoors Retailer, Inc. does not provide any meals or lodging, and no animals are allowed on the premises, aside from registered service animals such as guide dogs.
Very truly yours,
Melissa Nichals
From: Dave Stone, PorqTent International Date: Friday 14 Apr 2017 2:15 pm To: Melissa Nichals, Events Manager, Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Subject: R.S.V.P.
Dear Melissa,
Hey, no problem for me.
Jacqueline and I can camp out on the trade show floor in one of my PorqTents. This will be great advertising and she is trained to hide her droppings so there's basically no cleanup issue.
Just by pure chance she gave birth to a litter a few months back, so I can bring all the little ones along in exchange for our membership fee.
Jacqueline is also a certified Truffle Hog (sorry to sound crude, but that's the technical term). This should more than qualify her as a service animal.
During lulls in the action we can demonstrate how she works. We don't actually need truffles — a few dirty socks scattered around the exhibition hall will work, and if people aren't interested in that, we can set up a petting zoo with her piglets as the star attraction.
Jacqueline is still a bit protective of the little ones but hardly ever charges anymore. I've only been severely bitten twice and the last time was over a month ago, so she should be OK by now. Anyway, outdoors people know how to handle emergencies.
She's also attracted to women's crotches for some reason — probably some good photo ops there, don't you think?
Regards, Dave.
From: Melissa Nichals, Events Manager, Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Date: Monday 17 Apr 2017 10:11 am To: Dave Stone, PorqTent International Subject: R.S.V.P.
Dear Mr Stone: I'm sorry, but I have to be blunt. An internet search has revealed several disturbing news items related to a man with your name, and his pig. We were especially distressed to learn about the incident at the elementary school and the resulting prison sentence.
I regret to inform you that we have alerted the local authorities, who have your description and photographs of you, and who are prepared to intercept and arrest you should you attempt to trespass and attend any events sponsored by Outdoors Retailer, Inc.
Please heed this warning and do not contact us again.
Melissa Nichals.
From: D. Stein, FBI, PorqTent Division Date: Tuesday 18 Apr 2017 2:15 pm To: Melissa Nichals, Events Manager, Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Subject: Dave Stone, PorqTent International, and Jacqueline the Pig
Dear Ms. Nichals:
We have recently been made aware of email communications between you and a certain Dave Stone of PorqTent International.
Please be advised that Mr Stone and his pig Jacqueline are special agents and are working with the FBI on a very important investigation involving apple thieves. We believe that these thieves may try to infiltrate the Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Summer Trade Show in a few weeks, with the intent of making off with any untended apples (or truffles) that happen to be lying around.
Needless to say, this is serious business.
Therefore we recommend that you set aside adequate display space for Mr Stone and his pig and a few of his distinctive and brightly colored yet affordable PorqTents as a decoy for the thieves. When they see a lovely pig like Jacqueline they may be tempted to make off with her too, to go with the apples they steal.
At this point Jacqueline will spring into action, trained as she is at sniffing out rats (in addition to truffles, dirty socks, and female crotches), and we will be able to nab the culprits with very little if any gunfire. (Very seldom happens.)
A critical point in our strategy is, of course, getting Mr Stone and his pig Jacqueline in place along with a representative and tasteful display of PorqTents.
We also recommend putting up Mr Stone and Jacqueline in one of the better hotels in the area (separate beds, of course, with special attention to the menu, since Jacqueline is known to have a sensitive stomach).
We regard this as a small price to pay in the never-ending story of fighting crime.
Yours Very Truly,
D. Stein, Federal Bureau of Investigation, PorqTent Division
From: Melissa Nichals, Events Manager, Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Date: Wednesday 19 Apr 2017 8:01 am To: D. Stein, FBI, PorqTent Division Subject: Dave Stone, PorqTent International, and Jacqueline the Pig
Mr Stein:
Thank you very much for alerting us to this situation. We at Outdoors Retailer, Inc. are very concerned and will do everything we can to assist you.
First off, I think we should keep this as quiet as possible.
Please have Mr Stone and Jacqueline the Pig stop by my office early tomorrow morning, before sunrise, while the streets are still free of busybodies.
Have them come in through the back entrance, which leads directly to the parking garage. They will be out of sight that way.
Staff will be there to meet them to assure that they are treated appropriately.
Once again, thank you very much for alerting us.
Melissa Nichals
From: Dave Stone, PorqTent International Date: Wednesday 19 Apr 2017 8:03 am To: Melissa Nichals, Events Manager, Outdoors Retailer, Inc. Subject: Dave Stone, PorqTent International, and Jacqueline the Pig
See you soon! (And don't worry too much about your crotch. For the most part Jacqueline has been pretty mellow lately, but it's still a good idea to have a thorough morning shower before showing up for work.)
You may like your pack, and maybe your pack likes you (you'll never really know, but you can at least pretend that it does), but you won't agree on everything, you and your pack.
You have to live together, but living together is always a compromise. A compromise means that you can plan and scheme and fudge things and hope they always go your way but they won't. At best you'll get caught and scolded and have to give some ground. At worst, well, your pack may stop, and sit there for a little while without saying anything, and then before you know what's happened, it will die on you. Destroy itself. Unravel. Come apart at the seams. Cease to exist.
They do that.
And then you'll wish you had been smarter, easier to live with, more flexible. Less likely to perish alone in the wilderness.
But that's how life is. You need some things. Your pack needs some things. The two of you have to work it out.
What you need is a pack that is reasonably light, and strong. Besides strength you need toughness, which requires an ability to roll with the punches, take some hits, absorb some blows, and carry on. Your pack needs to be made of materials that are light, strong, and as immune to rust, corrosion, wear, rot, and insanity as they can be.
And you need a pack that is comfortable.
What your pack needs from you is respect.
Your pack needs to be treated as though you really care about it, appreciate what it can do for you, and understand how sophisticated it actually is, despite being made of simple stuff, despite being only a bag with some straps. You need to give your pack just a small bit of care, like keeping it out of the mud, away from fire, off the rocks, and giving it a good scrubby wash every now and then. Not all that often, not every day necessarily, but every now and then.
Do that, come through for your pack, and your pack will come through for you
– The pack bag (Le sac de paquet.) –
· Canvas ·
After animal hides, early on, the preferred material for pack bags was canvas, and remained so for a very long time.
Canvas is not glamorous. It is plain. No one thinks twice about canvas. It is there, waiting, like a good friend or a door mat, always ready to help out, dependable, easy to overlook, but reliable.
These qualities are rare.
You yourself may not have them.
For many centuries, when someone said canvas, what they meant was hemp. Strange but true.
The ancient Greek word kannabis, derived from even older words, meant a material that would make sturdy sails. Sails have always been important, and they require strong fabric to make them work. At one time the entire world depended on dependable sails. Sails were made of canvas and no one dared to try smoking them.
Canvas is a plain textile, whether of hemp or linen or cotton. Today we think of canvas as a cotton fabric. Fine. OK. (Yawn.) But its main purpose throughout history, after becoming sails, and avoiding being smoked, has been as a tent fabric. And if woven tightly, canvas can be nearly waterproof, at least for a while, for some uses, as in tents. As a tent material canvas serves well if it is waxed, and stretched tight, and pitched at an angle.
Whyzzat?
Because cotton fibers swell when wetted and this swelling closes the fabric's pores. Waxing and careful pitching do the rest. Canvas was the first waterproof and breathable fabric ever. Bing!
In pack bags canvas's waterproofness isn't stellar. What does matter is its other qualities. Canvas is soft, quiet, strong, durable, and feels warm to the touch. If woven properly canvas resists abrasion better than many synthetics (though less than some), but it does mildew, and will rot if left wet. And it is relatively heavy.
So now we mostly use other fabrics instead of canvas.
· Nylon ·
Like nylon.
Most pack bags today are made from the same stuff as toothbrush bristles. Nylon, the miracle of miracles of fabrics.
Developed during the 1930s, nylon is made of tiny chemical building blocks called monomers. These are like polymers but not as happy. Monomers live alone, and monomer life is monotonous. What are monomers anyway? Well, monomers consist of a few atoms stuck together by random chance working under the inevitable laws of nature, and then left that way. Unchanging. Forever. Alone.
Oh so alone.
So very alone.
Unless.
Unless?
Unless some random meddling chemist starts dinking around in the lab one day, and you are a diamine and the chemist decides to mix you up with some dicarboxylic acid and see if anything fun happens.
Sometimes.
Sometimes it does.
If there are lots of other diamines like you in a bottle, and enough dicarboxylic acid, and so on. In other words, if the chemistry is right.
Ah, chemistry.
If it is, if the chemistry is right, you mix it up. You, a diamine, and the dicarboxylic acid decide that life would be better if you were a team. And then lots of otherwise monotonous diamine bits join you and your acid partner, and more acid and more diamine bits, and pretty soon you have this really long conga line and everyone is having all kinds of fun, and you all decide hey, let's stay together. That makes you part of a polymer now. You are no longer alone. You have friends. All of you are joined together in one long line. Party on.
A polymer is one big thing, but made from many, many smaller things, and being part of a polymer is more fun than being a monotonous monomer all by your lonesome out in the dark somewhere.
Being part of a polymer means you always have lots of friends around. There are things to do. Places to go. Fun names to try on, like nylon 6,6, or nylon 5,10, or nylon 6,12, or nylon 10,12, and so on.
Suddenly you are part of a big family, and as it is in any family, your siblings and relatives all look kind of the same but not quite, and some are better at some things than others are, and some of them are even quirky too. Like some forms of nylon are so heavy and dense that they can't even be spun into yarns, which is important because of what we talk about next.
Are ya ready?
Mostly, for the stuff we're interested in, after being invented and all, and ending up in all kinds of strange products, nylon, as most of us know it, is used in fabrics. And that's where pack bags come in.
Nylon is a synthetic, meaning that it is something that does not occur in nature. But this isn't always bad. Since nylon doesn't occur in nature, there is nothing out there that knows how to eat it or how to grow on it. Boll weevils eat cotton like popcorn but there are no nylon weevils. Corn borers bore into cobs of corn, but there aren't any nylon borers. As for mildew, it's so early in the evolution of nylon as a substance that the dew hasn't even formed yet, let alone had time to get mildy.
Nylon doesn't get its hackles up over being abraded. Bugs don't bug it. No rot rots it. It barely even absorbs water, and many chemicals, even some nasty ones, only roll off its back. Hah!
Ha! Ha! Ha!
Nylon melts rather than bursting into flames, it's comfortably stretchy, it can be shiny, lustrous, or dull. It takes dyes. Nylon fabric can be light and filmy or sturdy and stout. It is handy. Dandy-handy. 1
Nylon fabric comes in many varieties, but basically we think of only two, a solid, smooth, slippery fabric, or a ripstop.
Ripstop is a smart fabric, very smart. Ever so smart.
Ripstop can be made of various textiles other than nylon, so it's not the basic substance that's important, but the idea behind it. Ideas take smarts. Ripstop is more a concept than a thing, which is, that if you weave a fabric and then you lay in a heavier, stronger yarn every so often, you get a finished fabric made of two yarn weights. Most is the normal weight and the other is the heavy, tough stuff, but not much of it. The end result is a fabric of ordinary weight that is almost as tenacious as if it was really heavy, but without being really heavy.
Ripstop fabric is stronger overall than single-weight fabric, but the real genius inside the idea it is that ripstop stops rips. (OK, it has a pretty good name too.)
We saw the word tenacious go by a couple sentences back. Did you notice? Tenacity is actually a technical term. Tenacity is a measure of how well fabric resists tearing, if a tear does get started somewhere. Since the whole point of ripstop fabric is not to rip, ripstop fabrics are tenacious by nature. 2
How many rips would a ripstop stop if a ripstop could stop rips? Plenty, because that's what it's supposed to do. That's what it does for a living.
The ripstop fabric's pattern may be either square or diamond-shaped, or both (giving you a super anti-rippety-stoppity ripstop). The point is that the heavier yarns are too hard to tear under normal stress, so they absorb that stress, dissipate it by routing it evenly into the rest of the fabric, and then your pack stays intact and you don't die.
But how about the other option, not-ripstop?
Most packs are not actually made from ripstop fabric. They are made of relatively heavy solid fabrics of a single weave. This may be taffeta, oxford cloth, pack cloth, ballistic cloth, Cordura®, or something else again. The terminology is not exact, and there are trademarked brand names buzzing around all over. (In fact, one just flew by, right?) But you get the idea. 4
Taffeta and oxford cloth are pretty similar, with taffeta generally thought of as being a bit lighter, but maybe not. Some of the names, like pack cloth or ballistic cloth, refer more to the weight of the fabric than to the weave.
Taffeta has a plain weave, though sometimes it might have a slight ribbed appearance. Oxford cloth is pretty much the same thing except that its weave is jiggered a bit to give it a coarser, more basket-weave appearance. This looks good both in shirts and in packs, especially those for manly men. And the rest of us too.
Pack cloth is basically only a heavier fabric of whatever kind, and generally has a waterproof, urethane coating on one side. (Urethane is the stuff that peels off like sunburned skin after a couple of years.) Ballistic cloth is about the same thing, just very heavy, and with a kinkier name. 3
Weights for fabric used in pack bags range from about 200 to 500 denier, or around three to eight ounces per square yard of fabric (85 to 225 grams per square meter). In light and ultralight packs heavy fabric might be skipped altogether, or used only on the bottom, with an intermediate weight fabric going into the shoulder straps and waist belt for a tad more abrasion resistance there.
· Extra Tough Fabrics ·
Ballistic cloth sounds tough. It is.
It is because it is nylon, and because it has a thick and heavy weave. The yarn weights for ballistic cloth range from about 1000 to 2000 denier. (Denier is the weight in grams of 9000 meters of a single yarn. This sounds excessive — single yarn, 9000 meters — but the French are like that. Denier belongs to them in case you hadn't guessed.) Common yarn weights for clothing run from maybe 50 to 150 denier, to give you some perspective.
Ballistic cloth is used in luggage, computer cases, and sports bags as well as packs, and in a few clothing items as well. It gets its name because it looks like it might be bulletproof, and early on it was, in a way, if you were not all that fussy about exactly which bullets you might stop on a given day. Overall, ballistic cloth is decent — strong, puncture resistant, and tear resistant.
Cordura® is a brand name, though there are similar products under different names. Cordura® is nylon, and the process used to manufacture it gives it a rough but fuzzy texture that is especially good at resisting abrasion, though it may not be so puncture proof as flat weaves like oxford cloth. Like ballistic cloth, Cordura® is used in luggage, hunting equipment, heavy footwear and some clothing as well as in packs.
Aramids. Who? Aramids.
These are forms of nylon from outer space. They are super strong, just about indestructible, not normally made into sheets of fabric, but as with Kevlar®, a proprietary form produced by DuPont™, they are generally used as a reinforcing fiber. Various versions are used in actual body armor, and even as substitutes for asbestos.
Exemplifying how amazing this aramid stuff is, it won't burn or even support combustion. Get it hot enough (800° F to 900° F, or 427° C to 482° C) and it will break down, but it won't even melt first. It performs this act while remaining flexible, and twice as resistant to cuts as cotton is. 5
Spectra® — like Kevlar® but different. Not an aramid but good old polyethylene, like the stuff clear plastic bags are made of, but tweaked a bit. It is High Modulus Polyethylene or HMPE. A bit gnarly though — it is currently the strongest synthetic fiber in existence, at eight to 10 times the strength of steel (40 percent stronger than those aramids, and having twice the cut resistance. It is also known as Dyneema®, which is the same stuff but made by a different company, and also stronger somehow, at up to 15 times the strength of steel instead of 10 times.
Spectra, unlike steel, is light enough to float, while exhibiting a resistance to chemicals (like water) that is way beyond steel's as well. Rot, micro-critters, and ultra-violet light don't affect it either. In packs it, like Kevlar and Dyneema, is used mostly as a reinforcing fiber. Elsewhere in the fabric world it finds its way into climbing equipment, shoes and luggage. 6
The High Modulus Polyethylenes have a lot of strength for little weight but they do melt at relatively low temperatures, somewhere between 145° F and 155° F (152° C). While they could be fashioned into a wider range of clothing fabrics, their chemical makeup is one of extremely long molecules (the high modulus part) of almost inert materials, which contributes to a slippery feel that people don't like in clothes, for example. (Although with HMPE you could have bullet proof underwear.) 7
· Super Light Fabrics: Silnylon ·
Now we get to pop over the opposite half of the lunatic universe. We won't be comparing the next set of fabrics to slabs of steel, but to the gossamer-thin, silvery unobtanium wings of hyperintelligent cyborg butterflies capable of sailing on the faintest of solar winds. Not that long ago nylon itself was a strange mystery material, and even more recently nylon soaked in a silicone oil was too. (It was then and still is now called silnylon.)
Then came spinnaker cloth, and after it, Cuben Fiber (now known as "Dyneema Composite Fabric").
Silnylon. Spinnaker. Cuben. Dyneema Composite Fabric. Sound exotic? They are, but you might already be using some of them.
Silnylon is now used extensively in stuff sacks, tarps, single wall tents, and packs. Depending on which variety you encounter it may feel light, dry and crinkly, or still light but slippery, or yet again light, but almost oily. The samples you find in high quality items from big-name manufacturers look better and feel drier than the stuff you may get to make your own gear from, but the latter is still fine.
An early silnylon tarp I bought from a major retailer came with a somewhat oily feel that didn't dissipate even after years, though the fabric was impeccable otherwise, and the oily feeling never became an oily stain anywhere, nor did anything peel from the fabric or rub off.
Still, the fabric you buy already professionally made into stuff sacks or packs seems nicer all around.
Silnylon isn't really fancy except for a couple of things. The basic fabric weighs 1.1 ounces per square yard, which would be around 35 grams per square meter if we ever calculated such things. The silicone coating, which permeates the fabric (and is not just painted on one side) adds 0.35 ounces (10 g) to give a total weight of 1.45 ounces per square yard (50 grams per square meter).
Considering that some of the usual pack materials weigh five to 10 ounces per yard, this seems nuts. And it is nuts for some people, for some loads. No, scratch that. Make it most people, most of the time. Normal people won't go near an extremely light pack, even if tempted by the possibility of carrying extremely light loads. It takes time to catch on.
But if you have caught on, and if your loaded pack weighs 15 to 20 pounds (seven to nine kg), and it's made well, and you are reasonably smart, this fabric can handle it. A pack made with silnylon won't stand abuse. As in: you can't sit on it and expect it to come through for you. You don't throw it into the back of a gritty pickup truck and pretend that everything will be fine, especially if 10 other people dump their packs and boots in after you, and your pack is on the bottom of it all.
But this fabric is tough. Silicone-impregnated fabric has good abrasion resistance, and it is a lot more tear proof than the plain version of the same fabric. And silnylon is automatically waterproof. Sewn-through seams leak but the fabric won't.
And another thing.
This coating of silicone oil actually becomes part of the fabric. It doesn't peel off like the polyurethane coating on regular nylon. It is there for the duration. Make a frameless pack from silnylon and make it well and you don't really have to worry about the fabric as long as you take reasonable care of the pack. The pack will hold as much weight as you can stand to carry in it, and you will give up before the pack does.
Want a light pack? Use this fabric and make one that weighs from 10 to 16 ounces (285 to 450 g), depending on size, design, and features. Or which weighs less, sometimes much less. And always more, if you want, but that's not the goal, is it?
· Super Light(er) Fabrics: Spinnaker Cloth ·
Lighter yet, there is (was) spinnaker cloth.
Kinky-doodle.
This is a concept rather than a type of fabric, the same way that ripstop is. The idea comes from cloth used in spinnaker sails on racing boats. You've heard about sailboat fuel. Well, this is the stuff that sailors use to fill their tanks.
Some spinnaker cloth is nylon. Some spinnaker cloth is polyester. People also use spinnaker cloth for making kites. Some is uncoated. Most (as used in backpacking) is coated. Weight (per square yard) ranges from 0.5 ounces up to 1.5 ounces (15 to 50 grams per square meter). The stuff that the cottage super ultra light backpacking manufacturers use (or once used) ranges from 0.7 to 0.99 ounces per square yard.
Spinnaker cloth is extremely delicate and for use only by the most accomplished super ultra light backpackers who aren't afraid to feel a little tingle of fear all day long, lest their packs suddenly explode and dump goodies all over the trail. Commercial packs of spinnaker cloth weighed from seven to 10 ounces, and used to be available from a couple of manufacturers, if you had a note from your mother, but they all seem to have been replaced now by Cuben/Dyneema Fiber packs. Oh, well. Never mind.
Why is spinnaker cloth a concept rather than a type of fabric? Because spinnaker cloth is any cloth used to make spinnakers, and that fabric can be anything you want. A spinnaker is a type of sail. Nuff said there.
For packs and tarps, the preferred spinnaker cloth was SpinnTex, made somewhere deep underground in secret caves by high tech gnomes with six-fingered hands and strange-looking tools. SpinnTex is silicone impregnated polyester ripstop, not nylon. It weighs 0.97 ounces per square yard. Next year, or even this year, or last year, you may see, or may have seen, a different brand, made of a different base fabric. Technology marches on. Don't fret so much.
Yeah, fiber. And that's Cuben, not Cuban. Fidel never stirred this pot. But we are still sailing.
Cuben Fiber came to us by way of the 1992 America's Cup race, and the boat America3 (pronounced America Cubed), that used sails made of a new material called America Cube Carbon Fiber Hybrid. The news media could not handle it (too many syllables, took too long to say, grammar checkers went nuts) and so they shortened this to Cuben Fiber and that's what we all called it until the huge Dutch company DSM Dyneema acquired Cubic Technologies, the original U.S. manufacturer, in May of 2015.
Anyhow, Cuben Fiber or Dyneema Composite Fabric, whichever you prefer, is light. It is tough. It is waterproof.
But.
It can't stand much abrasion, so its use in packs, clothing, or anything else that contacts the ground or is involved in rubbing activities is problematic.
This non-fabric fabric is a composite.
A composite is assembled, not woven on a loom. Cuben/Dyneema Composite Fiber has two outer layers of clear plastic that sandwich a layer of fibers between them. The fibers can be laid in randomly or can be loosely woven. These fibers provide the strength and the outer layers hold them together and provide waterproofness. (Or if you are still interested in sails, windproofness.)
The middle layer, the fibers, may be carbon fiber as it was early on, but this layer is more likely strands of Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMWPE), basically the same stuff that Spectra and Dyneema are made of. The two outer layers are polyester film (clear, non-woven polyester sheets).
Got it?
Cubic Tech, the manufacturer, sells to companies that use this material in "parachutes, kites, balloons, airships, tension structures, tubes and tube reinforcements, flexible pressure vessels, tarps, backpacking, medical devices, protective clothing, aerospace equipment", and so on.
Airships. Sure. Gimme two. 8
Since 1992 Cuben/Dyneema Composite Fiber has been refined, and now you can buy it in quantities small enough for the home hobbyist who can afford it. Note that. Who can afford it.
One retailer had this truly insanely light and insanely expensive fabric available by the yard or by the roll in January, 2017, at the following prices.
Weight (oz/yd2)
Weight (g/m2)
Cost/yard
Cost/36 m roll
0.34
11.4
$25
$ 899
0.51
17.4
$28
$ 999
0.67
22.7
$34
$ 615
0.74
25.4
$29
$1050
1.00
34.0
$28
$ 999
1.43
48.4
$31
$1095
The short interpretation of this is that Cuben/Dyneema Composite Fiber is really light and really expensive material. An experimentally-minded hiker named Bill Fornshell made a 1.5 ounce (42.5 gram) pack and seven ounce (198 gram) hammock out of Cuben. Light. Srsly. And given those prices, expensive too, even if you make your own.
So you may not want to.
– Conclusion (Zusammenfassung). –
Lighter than this we can't go yet. Does anyone want to go lighter? Sure. Always. You betcha.
Should anyone go lighter? Your call.
Silnylon is extremely light as these things go, and surprisingly tough due to its silicone coating. A small pack made from silnylon is naturally abrasion resistant, easy to clean (no open weave for dust and grit to lodge in), waterproof (aside from the seams), and strong enough to do the job.
Move to spinnaker cloth, or something similar, or to Cuben Fiber and you are immediately inside a world where your pack can function admirably, as long as it's really small and your load is especially light. And as long as you don't fall on the pack or scrape it against thorns.
It is hard to imagine a fabric being much lighter than half an ounce per square yard, or what real advantage a person would get. Is a four ounce pack noticeably lighter than a seven ounce pack? (Or in terms of tarps, would a six ounce tarp really beat out a nine-ouncer?) This is a question only you can answer.
Weights will go down, eventually, but don't expect anything radical soon. What is more likely is that strength and durability will go up. Things like puncture resistance, abrasion resistance, tear strength, ability to hold stitches. (Or better tapes and adhesives for those fabrics that should not be sewn.) These things will improve. And they they will be more practical improvements than absolute cuts in absolute weight. But they won't be here this afternoon. Maybe tomorrow afternoon.
Next up — what the rest of the pack is made from.
– Footsie Notes –
1: Nylon properties: http://bit.ly/12oFsXf
2: Tenacity: http://bit.ly/1sg3WZi
3: Ballistic cloth: http://bit.ly/1GaRBxX
4: Cordura, etc.: http://bit.ly/1sg3WZi
5: Aramid: http://bit.ly/1Bx3Jtg and http://bit.ly/12Kejhg
6: Spectra: http://bit.ly/1ww3VaM and http://bit.ly/1IvU2NA
7: HMPE: http://bit.ly/1waulNb and http://bit.ly/1vLyHuj
(About the giant furry bumper car of the wilderness.)
By Joe "Dirty Maggot" Periwinkle
Werewolves are wimps by comparison
T here is no other animal of this country which is more widely and deservedly dreaded than the grizzly bear.
(William Hamilton Gibson, "Camp Life in the Woods and the Tricks of Trapping and Trap Making")
Except possibly the land shark, but those are even rarer and don't have big paws.
Other creatures, when they see a grizzly bear come trundering along, hey, they know the score. It's not like some wombat out there for a slow stroll and a couple of farts after lunch. No. Not at all. It is not funny. At all.
Take your puma, or a random collection of mixed wildcats, for instance, if you don't have a puma handy. Put those up against a grizzly and what? What have you got? It's like pin a kitty on the bear, that's what.
It's like when you take a balloon and rub it on your sweater and then stick it on the resident house cat, and then the cat walks around the house with the balloon hanging there by static electricity. That's it. Get a grizzly bear sauntering along in puma-and-wildcat country picking up some static electricity and you might see half a dozen of them kind of bobbling around, stuck on the grizzly's outer fur.
And the grizzly itself?
What do you think? Does the grizzly have a problem?
No. The grizzly does not have a problem. Doesn't even notice. Grizzlies are like that.
In this corner we have...
Want to corner a grizzly though? Want to do that, really? Think about it first.
Try cornering shoelaces, see what happens. What happens? No one cares. Shoelaces. Who cares? You hardly need them. They just lie there in a pile like cloth noodles, easily ignored, cornered or not.
Get a bag of rats and dump them into a box. That's cornered rats, right? And what happens then?
You got a box of rats, that's what. Action? What action? Rats in a box.
One rat might nibble another one every now and then, but not enough to notice. No fun, no action. Period. Unless you really, really like rats. Most people don't. Not that much. Not really.
Put up a fence in grizzly country and leave it in place for a while. Like a funnel. Like one of those fish traps. You'll see.
Come back later and take a look. See what has drifted into the trap. That's more like it, but don't get too close. "The grizzly, however, or Ephraim, as he is commonly termed by trappers, often displays a most unpleasant readiness to attack and pursue a man, even in the face of fire arms."
This was wrote down in the olden days when manly men went out and did things like putting up a fence to see how many grizzlies they could collect. Collect like deadly fuzz-bunnies in a lint basket. And then, probably, those guys went over and poked through the fence with some sticks or something, to see what would happen, and that's where the readiness to attack and pursue part kicked in.
Old Ephraim ripping the snot out of anything within reach. Out of the fence, out of the people, out of the entire township. And not working up a sweat. Not even. That's your grizzly bear right there.
Forget the fence. Forget the little guys that put it up and stood there snickering and poking with their sticks. They are gone. Long time ago. Shredded. Atomized. The fence too. Everything. Old Ephraim don't take kindly to strangers short on manners.
Creature of the deep wilderness, roaming far and wide, pillaging at will, devouring all it finds, and destroying the rest. This is the grizzly.
You can call it ursus arctos horribilis or ursus arctos middendorffi. Just Grizzly, or Alaskan Brown. No matter, they're really the same beast, the King of Terror. The bear of bears.
Some general rules when you are there.
Don't hike alone or after dark, or wear clothing made of bacon.
Do whistle, sing, or make noise when in grizzly country, but don't be annoying about it.
If a bear hears you it will either move away if not interested, or, alerted, end your puny life in one smooth move by biting your head right off. You probably won't feel a thing unless the bear wants to make an example of you.
Never get between a cub and its mother.
Think about it — why would you want to? Are you dumb as a post hole?
Either of them, cub or mother, are big enough to do you in, the mother especially. Heck, if you even see a cub, let alone an adult grizzly, back off. Way, way back. Try two counties over.
Stay clean. Strawberry-scented shampoo is not a good idea, so simply staying clean is not 100% of the rule.
A grizzly could care less about your armpit smell for example. In fact, armpit smell might even help keep a bear away. You know? (Unless it doesn't.)
Referring to the meat reference in item one though, the next best way to catch a bear's attention, other than actually wearing bacon, is having bacon grease in your beard, on your lips, or in your hair. Don't give a grizzly any reason to come over for a hot kiss or even an exploratory lick, OK?
Don't sleep in the clothes you cook and eat in, especially if you are a sloppy cook and a messy eater.
Instead try this — If you do have clothes that smell like food, just leave them on and hang yourself with your food from a high tree overnight, at least 15 feet (5 m) above ground and 10 feet (3 m) out from the tree's main trunk. This way you're safe and can have snacks all night too.
A couple of caveats though: Hanging by your thumbs may cause cramping after several hours. And hanging by your neck, though it is pretty secure, can induce nasal congestion and result in breathing difficulties.
When sleeping in the backcountry remember that a tent can keep you more protected than sleeping in the open.
Unless the grizzlies in those parts know that tents have food sleeping inside them.
So, given that, keep a flashlight and a noisemaker handy, and know how to use them. A grizzly likes nothing better than some idiot shining a light in its eyes and making a godawful nasty racket when it enters a tent around midnight.
It may even be so well disposed toward you that it bites your head off first, sparing you the unpleasantness of having to watch your legs get chewed off before the bear even bothers with your head. If it does.
Do not approach a grizzly to get a picture of it.
Even less, do not try to stand the bear up for a group shot with your hiking buddies. Grizzlies are notoriously camera-shy. For a reason. No grizzly has ever seen itself in a photo without thinking that its butt looked too big.
So keep the funny hats for parties at home and don't try putting them on the bears.
According to the National Park Service, if you run into a grizzly it is your fault. Period.
Apologize, be humble, avoid eye contact, talk softly and back away slowly. Do not attempt to argue with the bear or to challenge it. No matter what the circumstances, you are at fault. Immediately turn yourself in at the nearest ranger station.
Say you are hopping mad that some reeking hulk has cut you off without even glancing your way first. Right. You know how this works. There it is, waddling along as if it owns the whole damn trail, completely oblivious to anything and everything, kind of mindlessly dawdling and weaving around, and meanwhile you are trying to get somewhere. So you ram it.
Bad move.
If a park ranger sees you do this you will get a ticket. Grizzlies always have the right of way, on trails or off, so pay attention.
Share. If a grizzly takes a fancy to your backpack, give it up. Let the bear have it. You can always get another one.
Despite centuries of trying, grizzlies have never learned how to ask politely for things they need or want. They grab. They can't help it. It's compulsive or something.
This is true.
Those massive, clumsy paws full of claws like railway spikes, and those mouths full of teeth like scythes? It's all they have to work with.
There is only so much subtlety and nuance you can wring from a body like this. No fine motor skills at all. Which could be why grizzlies dismember first and regret later. Often many years later, long after it is too late. Write this down.
Also, keep in mind how many times you have seen a grizzly hiking along wearing a backpack. Just about never, right?
Very few packs ever made will fit a grizzly, or even come close, so when a grizzly does find one that it can delude itself into thinking just might possibly be somewhere near the right size, it gets so excited that it grabs, without thinking. Normally the bear even forgets about trying to ask, or about starting a polite conversation before working up to the real subject.
Hey. A grizzly may even be so overcome with joy at finding a good pack that it accidentally converts the pack into a cloud of small fabric particles. This is totally, totally embarrassing.
Intense shame and self-loathing may drive the grizzly to blindly run you down, on the chance that you will forget what you witnessed.
Or the bear may just be pissed in general. That happens too.
So there you are on the first day of your annual two week vacation. It's all you've got and you have to make it work. If you don't, you have to wait until next year to try again. But even if it's the opposite, even if it's a scary-wild success, you still have to wait until next year to do it again.
At least by this point you've already learned one of life's valuable lessons — you are screwed.
There's nothing we can do about that so let's get back to the story.
You are about five miles into your really big test of ultralight backpacking. You've done some short overnighters and day hikes and tested your setup as well as you can. Your pack weighs six ounces, empty, and you have hardly anything in it anyway. A spare shirt, a change of underwear, an aluminum cat-food can cup, a few handfuls of granola, a wispy tarp that you hope will work (if it doesn't blow away while your back is turned), and a sleeping bag that you can actually see through.
You have convinced yourself that this is really what you want so you're trying it. You stand there for a moment or two pretending to admire the scenery while scanning the horizon for the first hint of a change in the weather and you wonder a whole lot if this is actually a good idea after all. But you're stuck with it so you turn and continue walking.
If you can finish this day you have six more to go.
Of course things will work out but still — you try not to think about it.
In case you eventually decide that your pack might suit you better if it was more than a small plain pouch with a couple of shoulder straps, yes, it is possible to have more than that. You don't have to take it to the point where you can't remove anything else without your gear disappearing entirely. There are options.
Such as tail fins.
But no. We're trying to get away from those.
Other options.
Think.
Look in the other direction, the one opposite of tail fins. Some of the options you find in that direction can be worthwhile. Let's look now. Let's see if we can find some useful things to make a pack more than a scant plain anonymous depressing bag completely lacking in personality and almost not there at all.
– Poke it into a pocket, posthaste. –
Pockets are maybe the first thing to think about. Maybe not, but maybe. Let's see.
Pockets are handy. You can think of your backpack as a portable pocket that you happen to carry on your back. If one pocket is good, why not more? Why not add some?
Hey. Pockets.
If you are a climber or a skier then whenever you're taking a few whacks at your sport you are doing something aggressive and specialized. This isn't for you, this backpacking thing, and this mooning around mumbling about the idea of pockets, but that's fine. We're all about backpacking here. We're ignoring you anyway, you nasty aggressive people with your skis and hammers and poles and bags of hardware and such. For backpacking, and even for day hiking, extra pockets are dandy. Dandy and not aggressive. Poop on aggressive.
Dandy is fine.
Why dandy? Why are they dandy? And are they handy?
Dandy because you can put things into pockets. And then (pay attention here) you can take things out again. In...out. In...out. Pretty easy, eh? Nifty idea that's been around for ages, and it still works, without batteries. Everyone knows how to make pockets work.
You too. Handy.
The difference between town living and trail living is that on the trail things get messy and hard to keep track of. Say you want to stop for lunch. Fine, so you stop someplace nice and then what? You set your pack down and open it, and then you pull out almost everything you put into the pack when you broke camp earlier that same day. You lay everything out on the ground, keeping it fairly close so you don't lose track of anything, and then you choose the things you need and make lunch, and eat lunch, and then you stuff all of it back into the pack and get it done right and then start hiking again. And then, almost without fail, you notice that nasty lump that is poking you in the back.
Let's review this, starting from dawn.
First you woke up. OK so far, as far as this whole being-conscious thing goes.
And.
Then you got out of bed and so on, and ate, and packed up. Then you walked for a while and then you pulled almost everything back out of your pack again and spread it all over the ground.
Now stop and think — how much of that last part makes sense? If it seems to make sense, then think about how much sense it makes when you realize you've left your camera hanging from a branch about eight miles back? Or maybe it's your one and only spare shirt? Your car keys? (Have a nice trip home!)
Pockets are good at making some things easier, like not losing your car keys at some anonymous spot on the ground in some anonymous forest someplace you may never get back to again, no matter how long you live or how hard you look for that exact spot, simply because you wanted lunch.
First, there is one big advantage that goes with pockets — they don't weigh much. So if you don't need to use a pocket then you don't take a big hit — you simply don't use it. But since most pockets are always there, you can use one of them whenever you feel like it, so there is no exact reason to make them removable either.
Pockets automatically help you organize.
Start with the pack — any pack is one big pocket. If you stop at that, you are all right. That works for a lot of people, a lot of the time, but we've just seen that there can be problems. If you have a few auxiliary pockets then you can organize down to finer and finer levels, like when you make an outline on paper for sorting out your thoughts, while writing your resignation letter and telling your boss, your co-workers, your (soon to be former) company exactly what's wrong with them and how you got to your conclusions.
OK, stepwise refinement. That's a familiar concept. Now let's apply the idea to pockets.
You have a limited number of pockets no matter what, so you have to choose what goes where. Putting the same things in the same pockets every day means you know where to find those things every time you need them. And pockets can't hold everything, so you choose what's important to have handy during the day, and those things go into the pockets.
You get to choose.
But maybe some ideas...well, maybe some ideas we could explore together?
If you have a small ultralight cook set and eat a hot lunch, you can carry that cook set in a pocket. The same goes for the day's food. Sort it out early in the morning or even the evening before and then carry one day's food outside the pack in a handy pocket. A warm hat, gloves, a wind jacket, sunscreen, sunglasses, maps, compass, water bottle — whatever you want to have at hand — pockets work for these things too.
– Where, oh where can the pockets go? –
Pockets can be inside the pack or outside. They can also be detachable.
Inside pockets are usually small. They are handy for keeping extremely valuable things securely in place, like those car keys. Remember them? Are they still with you? Better check now. Try the key pocket.
Your identification and money might go there too. But if you make your own pack or choose to modify one to suit you, you can rig up an internal pocket to do anything you want. Some packs have a sort of pocket to hold a sleeping pad inside, to fool your pack into thinking that it has a frame. That is also a pocket, and it is fine. So fine.
Outside pockets are normally bigger than the inside ones, and are usually made as permanent parts of the pack. Look for outside pockets on the sides, in front, or on top. Up on top is good. You don't have to bend over so far to get to it, and the extra layer of fabric on top can help deflect a light rain away from the main pack compartment for a while.
Most pockets are on the sides of the pack or on the front (the side most behindest you as you hike). Packs are usually narrow enough so that side pockets are out of the way, hiding behind your arms and not jutting out too far. They don't interfere much with anything. Balance the load evenly between left and right pockets and you can carry a fair amount of weight without hardly feeling it. These pockets are especially handy toward the end of the day when you take on a load of water just before chasing down a campsite, and you don't have far to go, especially if those pockets are deep and low down. (Try it — dry camps are often much better than those near water — less humid, less buggy, quieter, warmer, cleaner, fewer neighbors.)
The front pocket hangs out farther behind you and will upset your balance if you get reckless and go nuts stuffing it with heavy things, because it is hanging way out behind you. Got it?
But there is more room for the front pocket to be bigger, because there is more room on the wide side of a pack for a big pocket. Big but flat, that's the idea — good for large but light things like a tarp, rain gear or wind shell. Things like that.
The wild card in this system is the detachable pocket. Mostly these come as options on heavy packs, and are made of heavy fabric that will outlive you, even with heavy use, even if you drive a truck over one of them the first thing every morning out of sheer cussedness. They are so heavy and tough that they don't care. Most of these guys are big, almost like small packs themselves, but you can buy generic small pouches, sometimes, some places, that will serve. These are also made of relatively heavy fabric though. Well, at least the manufacturers are predictable.
So detachable pockets sound like a good idea but in real life they are kind of heavy, often large, and you have to carry these large and kind of heavy things even when empty. (Like if you use one as an overflow for extra food at the start of a long trip, you don't get to eat the pocket when it's empty — you still have to carry it.) They are a decent idea though. It is only the clumsy-heavy implementation that is a problem.
Another caveat: Detachable pockets are commonly made to fit only a specific pack. This limits your options even more.
However.
If you make your own gear you can do whatever you want, like sewing up a bunch of small stuff sacks of light fabric and making spare clip-on pockets that weigh less than an ounce and fold away to nothing. (For those who use grams, that number is also near absolute zero.)
Once more, your choice.
– Won't you please, please squeeze me? –
Some packs come with fancy compression systems. These vary a lot, in the same way that a writing system can be a networked computer using an Intel S5520SC motherboard, two Intel Xeon W5580s, two Thermalright HR-01 Plus heatsinks, four Crucial 6GB (3x2GB) ECC Registered DDR3-1333 ram kits, two Sapphire Radeon HD 4870 X2 2GB video cards, two Intel X25-E Extreme 128GB SSD, four Western Digital RE3 1TB hard drives, a Silverstone TJ10 case, six Scythe Slipstream 120mm fans, an Enermax Galaxy Evo 1250W power supply, an APC Smart-UPS 2200 uninterruptible power supply, and two Dell 3007WFP-HC 30" LCD monitors, or a pencil stub and a scrap of waste paper you stole from the library.
It's all relative.
The most important part? Is in your head, anyway.
But compression.
Compression means squeezing. Squeezing things. If you squeeze a pack then everything in it gets smooshed and acts more like a solid lump, with no air spaces, so it's less likely to wiggle.
Compression is a big deal for climbers and their alpine packs. Most climbing packs are smooth, with no outside pockets, because climbers want to keep everything sleek and tight. They want not to hang up on stray rocky nubbins, or to experience uncontrollable wiggling way up there upon them gnarly heights.
But compression is also common on many ordinary backpacks.
Compression is a nice thing to have, and a nice sales feature. The more you carry the more you need to futz, and having a collection of straps as technically busy as a railroad switchyard gives you the illusion that you may really be, after all, in control. But generally you'll be better off carrying a third or less of what the magazines and catalogs and sales people suggest. If you do that you can still do the squeezy stuff but you won't need so many straps or such big arm muscles to make it happen.
Where compression helps is...
On traditional, heavy packs.
There, it keeps the lid on. Most packs have straps these days. You get straps attaching up top and more straps attaching at the bottom, and when you connect these two sets of straps and pull like crazy the whole pack gets vertically compressed. This makes the pack shorter but fatter, so...
Most of these packs have a couple more straps running horizontally on each side, from back to front, like Uncle Albert's gut cinching belt, so his floppy parts have something to hang over, and so he can pretend he's slimmed down. On a pack these straps tighten to accommodate the expansion and contraction that go with changes in load.
On light and ultralight packs.
Which sort of work the same way, but less radically. Most of these packs get stuffed pretty tight to start with because they are small and can't hold that much. And then you add food, and then you try to carry some water too. Because of all this you need less compression. And because your load is actually lighter overall you need less help from stabilizing straps anyway. But they do help.
And as you eat up your food the pack gradually goes from impossible-to-stuff to just hard-to-stuff, to being pleasantly taut, to being kinda loose by the end of the trip, but also amazingly light, unlike a heavy pack which will always be large and stiff and full of strange, dark, echoing extra corners, and will always need cranks and winches to whip it into shape. But a couple of compression straps fix up a kinda-loose ultralight pack really well.
Compression does help with smaller packs, but it's a simpler game. You don't need any real strategy or anything, so forget you saw this fake bullet-pointed list and simply get on with it. You'll do fine.
– Anti-squeezing. –
A lot of light packs have side straps, just like the big packs, and these help, but the straps are OK being lighter and simpler than the straps on big packs.
And besides, most light packs have an extension collar or expansion collar (two terms for the same thing) at the top, allowing you to change the pack's volume. This device extends up like a tube from the top of the pack and is the same diameter as the pack bag, and might not even be a separate piece — just a seamless continuation of the pack bag that provides extra room if you ever need it. You always seem to.
At the start of your trip this collar is often extended up as far as it will go, because you have extra munchables to carry and are desperate to make them fit, anywhere, but as the days roll by and you consume your consumables the pack shrinks back down again vertically. At the end of your trip your pack is back to its nominal volume, sort of compressed, but without the need for a heavy and complex set of straps and buckles. It ends up looking like it has completed a successful diet.
An extension collar, then, is like a turtleneck at the top of a pack. Most of these extension collars have a drawstring closure and a light auxiliary strap to cinch them closed. A velcro tensioner sometimes stands in for a buckle. The point of an extension collar is to give you room to stuff extras into the pack so you can get to them quickly (think rain gear), and room to stuff extras like spare food and water, so you can take more of them and then bounce back to normal later on. An extension collar is a way of fudging.
An extension collar also changes the geometry of the whole pack as it expands and contracts, and works best with packs that have some kind of frame, whether it's a real frame or a pseudo-frame like a folded sleeping pad. For packs that rely on getting stuffed full and squeezed tight to maintain rigidity, some kind of external, add-on overflow is likely to be better, such as external pockets or stuff sacks that lash on, because those don't affect the pack's basic design — they just hang on somewhere. And no matter what, leaving the top of the pack with a big wide, floppy, extendable tube on it means that the whole pack will end up at least a little more floppy and sloppy, all the time.
– Some day the rain must fall, sucka. –
A lot of people spend a lot of time waterproofing packs.
First you need a pack made from fabric that has been coated to make it waterproof. Then the pack requires tight seams, and then you have to go around and seal each of those seams. Then you suffer intense disappointment when the pack still leaks and everything inside gets wet.
Plan B (Let's hear it for The Society to Preserve Plan B!) is to buy or make a pack cover.
The good — A pack cover isn't fancy or complicated, and it only has to be pretty-much waterproof to help a lot.
The bad — you get to carry an extra piece of single-use gear that is good for nothing else.
Other options...
Stuff things into separate plastic bags before loading your pack. Sleeping bag in one, spare clothes in another, odds and ends in a third, camera stuff in a fourth, and so on. The upside of this is that it works well, keeps your things organized, and doesn't add significant weight. The downside is that in a rain your pack itself still gets wet, which is not good if you use the pack as a pillow or keep it under your knees when you sleep. But hey.
The other upside is that you end up with extra plastic bags, which are handy at times. Slit the sides of a big trash bag from end to end, making one flat sheet, twist it up good, and you have an emergency strap. Leave it flat and you have a sit-pad or ground sheet. Drape it over your head and you have a makeshift poncho. And so on.
You can also (What are we up to now, Plan D? Plan E?) carry a separate, heavier-weight plastic bag as a rain cover for the whole pack. Cut a couple of slits for the shoulder straps to fit through, and simply slip it over the top of the pack as needed. OK, now you're stuck with an extra bag, and it weighs something. The four-ounce/113 g heavy duty "contractor clean-up bags" are huge and work well, but they are relatively heavy, stiff, and bulky. You're stuck with the overhead of that extra weight although you can use the bag to sit on during lunch breaks and around camp.
Tradeoff time. You now have yet one more opportunity to weigh the advantages against the anti-vantages.
In weather that's likely to be mostly good, but with a chance of showers, maybe you carry a lighter, two-ounce trash bag and keep it in reserve in case of rain. It won't stand up to abuse, or whipping winds. But it's light, etc.
If rain is certain, then you have the options of traveling with a pack that's wet on the outside, or one that's protected by a dedicated pack cover, or by a plastic bag. Any way you go you take some kind of hit. Rainy weather is like that.
The final option — use a poncho as rain wear and fit your pack under it. This works really well if the weather is not too windy, and if you are comfortable using a poncho.
– Cushy bits. –
If your pack is frameless, but one of those that uses a sleeping pad next to your back as a sort of frame, then you have comfort built in. Most people use a closed cell foam pad. Open cell foam is like a sponge. Its cells are, after all, open. Therefore it soaks up water and sweat. Closed cell foam gets wet on the outside but doesn't absorb water, or sweat, because its cells are closed. (Get it?) Closed cell pads are like those blue ones you see all over. They are simple to wash or rinse off, and when the surface is dry, the pad is dry.
Or an inflatable pad. How about one of those?
An inflatable pad allows you to dial in your pack-frame comfort level by how much air you leave inside the thing. More air makes the pad stiffer. Puff it up and it won't conform so well to the shape of your body but it makes the pack more rigid and easier to carry, especially if you have a supportive hip belt of some kind. Less air makes the pad softer against your back but your pack then gets less stiff and more saggy.
If you want to experiment, and don't mind an extra ounce or two of weight, then make a pack stiffener (call it a home-made framesheet). Stick a sheet of cardboard or a piece of artist's foam-core board into your pack. Cut it to size, wrap it in a light plastic bag, tape that shut, and stick it into your pack. Try it in addition to your sleeping pad. Put it on the side of your sleeping pad that is away from your back. The plastic bag will keep it dry. Use one layer, two, three, whatever — see what works for you.
Placing the stiffener away from your back prevents the knobs on your spine from getting sore as they poke into it. The extra rigidity added to your pack may be refreshing, or not. At least it's easy and quick to test. And cheap. Hack it up and reassemble it any way you want, with duct tape. Make it from horizontal segments or vertical ones, or both. See what works. If you build it with taped joints, then those joints will flex and help this makeshift framesheet conform to your body's contours.
Another thing. Take along a large plastic bag or two to put your bedding in, whether your bedding is a sleeping bag or a quilt. You should always have at least one bag, big enough to work, though two bags are better, the inner one with its open end pointing up, and the other, overlapping, with its open end pointing down (instant wetness protection, and you can still squeeze the extra air out of it). Plastic bags are handy as raw material during emergencies, as noted, and they guarantee that no sweat or rain will soak your bedding. This is important.
In the morning when you break camp, fold your sleeping bag into a large, flat rectangle that fits the shape of your pack, and then carefully put it into the pack next to your back. It is a nice, soft layer of padding, and the enclosing plastic bag or bags provide a barrier against sweat. Use a plastic bag even if your pack stiffener is a sleeping pad. Cover that too. You don't want to get it sweaty and greasy and then lay your nice down bag on it every night.
Take some extra cordage, an extra strap or two, a few sturdy safety pins, and some hefty rubber bands. All these are handy for tying things together, for hanging things, or for making temporary repairs, along with duct tape.
An extra webbing strap is good for lashing a spare stuff sack to the outside of your pack for that occasional carrying job.
Safety pins are great for fastening things securely. For example, wash one pair of socks and let them dry as you hike, secured to your pack with pins. Use pins to lock your hat to the pack on one of those days when you don't need sun protection and a hat is too hot to wear. If the hat is pinned on it won't get away.
Having half a handful of thick rubber bands can also be a huge blessing. They're really handy. Really, really handy. And if you get bored you can play with them.
With these few extra things, about all you need is food, water, and a sleeping bag. You can jury rig the rest.
