All Those Tasty Extras

All Those Tasty Extras

Additional Backpack Components.

– Let's do some figuring. –

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.

Bye.