Let's Supersize Everyone
One size to rule them all.
– How Big Is Yours? –
Check out a catalog of outdoor gear, or visit a store that sells backpacking equipment. Be sure to read some of the ad copy in a magazine or catalog first. It gets scary, and fast. Recreational Equipment Incorporated (REI) says you need 2400 to 4200 cubic inches of pack volume for a two to four day trip (that's 40 to 70 L). Kelty says 3000 to 6000 cubic inches (50 to 100 L) for two days, and 3500 to 6500 cubic inches (60 to 110 L) for four days. Those are some big packs, for what is basically a weekend. 1, 2
Random volumes are hard to visualize, so let's get specific. Let's go with REI's maximum pack volume for two days. That's 70 liters. Now let's wave our little magic wand and convert that 70L pack to root beer. Done, and you now have before you 35 two-liter bottles of root beer. Get the picture? OK, finally, as the last step, drink the root beer in two days.
Heck. Just try fitting it into your car. Don't try picking it up though, without a fork lift. At over two pounds per liter (or one kilogram) that much root beer is too heavy to think about.
What else?
Got a long weekend instead of just two days? Then jump to Kelty's 110 liters, or 55 big ones chug-full of root beer. And that's if you like root beer. What if it gags you?
What then?
These are big packs, my friend.
This is desperate living.
But are you adventurous and husky? Stick with Kelty then. Spend time with them. Get to know the Kelty world. For a week, Kelty says you need 4000 to 7000 cubic inches (65 to 115 L). Or more. That's right up there with the Samsonite Cruisair Spinner 29 inch Upright Suitcase. The one that has wheels to help you deal with its 6837 cubic inch capacity (112 L or 56 giant root beers). 3
The suitcase weighs 15 pounds empty (7 kg), but that is barely more than one of those huge backpacks.
In the suitcase's favor, its hard-sided, temperature and impact resistant ABS shell (with a textured finish) is rugged. And it looks better than most packs. Also, it has a retractable pull handle, and cross straps and tie tape to help you organize and secure the contents to prevent shifting that can cause wrinkled shirts, and divider panels to create separate internal compartments. Plus, there is a three-point locking system. It sounds complex, but this suitcase is simpler than many packs, and at $279.99 it's cheaper too.
One thing is really clear — go with products from giant companies in the Rec Biz, do industrial grade backpacking, and you get enormous packs. And consequent body damage.
– Yours is bigger than mine? Hah! –
Size is relative.
When you're small everything looks big. When you grow up everything looks normal. Until you go back and visit your first grade classroom, or even your old home town. Then everything looks small. That one-time vast world has somehow become tiny and cute, and quaint.
Later, when you get old, everything looks too big and complicated to bother with, and it's all as annoying as hell to boot. All you want by then is chips and beer and something half interesting on TV to nap to.
Back to the story.
Size is relative another way.
Medium is larger than small, large is bigger than medium, and expedition size has its own zip code and city council. When you see Expedition Size stamped on something, you know you're in for An Experience™.
It is too easy to read manufacturer recommendations and believe that packs fall into neat categories, especially one called Expedition Size. But there are other too-tidy categories as well, like packs for day hiking, packs for overnight trips, packs for weekend trips, packs for multi-day and short-week trips, packs for full-week trips, and packs for multi-week trips.
It all seems so orderly and reasonable, as if a pack always truly has to be bigger when the trip gets longer, and it seems that trips really do fall into distinct categories that someone approved once upon a time. So ask yourself why.
Why?
When you go on a longer trip do you get bigger? Do your clothes get bigger? Does your sleeping bag get bigger? Your shelter? Your water bottles? Sunglasses? Fingernail clippers? What gets so much bigger?
Ummmm, nothing?
Right!
Nothing gets bigger with longer trips other than the size of your pack. So why is that then? This is the main question. No one has ever explained it. Move your chair in close to get the straight poop.
Sorry. Bad choice of words. Forget you heard that here.
But.
But weight — there's more!
– Base packing. –
There are rules for packs, and backpacking, and these rules are based on weight, and they make sense.
Let's start and see where this goes.
First there is the weight of the empty pack and your naked body (please send photos if your body has won awards).
Now begin loading the pack, but only with durable goods — those things that you will bring back home again. When this is done, you have the weight of your loaded pack stuffed with everything you need for your trip MINUS some stuff that you haven't added yet. That minus-stuff is food, water, fuel, toothpaste, bug repellent, hand lotion, nose hair removing gel, and so on.
The number you get by weighing your pack when leaving out all the minus-stuff is the Base Pack Weight. It is important.
Next, put on your clothes. Don't forget this part. Nothing fancy needed, just cover up, unless you are VERY good looking even when mud-spattered, bug-bitten, tired, hungry, thirsty, short on sleep, and you never, ever smell bad. (In which case, please send some more photos, just to prove that the first batch wasn't a fluke due to careful studio lighting.)
– Approaching totality. –
Now we come to our next milestone, Total Pack Weight, which is base pack weight plus consumables (the food, water, fuel, hand lotion, nose hair removing gel, and so on that we left out earlier).
Are you OK with this so far? Following it all? Because if you aren't, you'll never be able to sound smarter than you look, unless you really have been voted world class by many, many eyeballs. (More photos, please.)
Next, add in the weight of the clothing you are now wearing plus sunglasses, hat, the camera around your neck, pocket lint, everything else, and that is your FSO weight (From Skin Out Weight). FSO weight is the total total weight. Totally total weight.
This is useful. Rather than thinking volume, think weight.
Weight then. Hmmmm.
What gets heavier on a longer trip? Tick-tick-tick-tick. Ping!
Food and fuel, because you carry more. Of them.
Water, no.
Water comes and goes. You load up, and as you drink it the weight shifts from your back to your stomach to various other internal locales, and then eventually you drain all that water out again and it's only a memory. You never tank up with a week's worth of water and slowly use it. You carry what you need, and only that, and only for a while. Anyway, the volume is almost insignificant compared to everything else.
Fuel? Doesn't really vary that much, unless you take way too much. A two-week supply of fuel isn't much more than a one-week supply, which isn't much more than a three-day supply. Some. Yes. A little. Sure, but not much. No volume change to speak of.
We're getting closer. We've eliminated things that we don't need to think about, and the answer is in what's left.
– The champeen, heavyweight division…Food! –
As a rule of thumb, start your food weight calculations assuming that you will need two pounds of the stuff every day. If you're smallish, or pack high octane food, or have a slower metabolism, then maybe you'll need less than two pounds a day (not quite 1 kg — about 900g, to be more precise), but two pounds is a good baseline. A simple round number. A starting point.
Both food weight and food volume increase arithmetically. Take twice as much and it will be twice as heavy and twice as bulky. (Note here for everyone who's a smartypants: This isn't mathematically true, exactly, since doubling your food bulk increases its volume, and volume increases in proportion to the cube of that lump's diameter, which is strictly true if all you eat is grapefruit, or basketballs, but how many mathematicians go backpacking anyway? Seriously? And we're talking about the relative size of the lump in your pack, and its practical effects, not about its exact volume, so fly away, fly away, fly away, you.)
OK. Most pack size recommendations follow that general doubling idea too, which sounds reasonable until you look at the end result and realize that the numbers must have come from someone who fell off a cliff and crashed head first into a tub of dumb-bunnies, because the result is perverse.
– Back to Goldilocks, the tiny girl genius, –
And her principal principle.
So right now it seems like we're way off track from discussing pack size but really we're not. Everything is related anyway, so it all counts toward your final grade. Pay attention. This is so very cool.
You can't simply say that if a 30 liter pack is big enough for two days, then a 150 liter pack is just right for 10 days, or a 450 liter pack is right for 30 days, or an 1800 liter pack is what you need to hike for four months on the Appalachian Trail.
Why Mommy?
Because, li'l Jimmy. Because pack size depends on who you are, what you want to do, and what you are capable of doing. Pack size should depend on base pack weight and the volume that happens to go with that weight. And both of these have to be relevant to exactly and only you, you cute-as-a-bug little buggy-bug you.
No simple formula works. No simple formula applies to everyone. No simple formula can figure it out for you. Experience counts, but you can help experience along by using your head. (Please now to remove all fingers from all nostrils, so to having them handy for advanced arithmetic, please.)
First decide what you need to carry on your typical trips, get a pack big enough for that, and you're about set. When you have your food packaged up, shove it in. When you need to carry more food, shove harder. When you need to carry even more food, get someone to help you shove, or consider a small, light stuff sack or two, temporarily strapped outside your pack.
That way you get a pack that's not too big and not too small. It will be just right, sort of, and sort of is what you can deal with. Sort of is perfect. Sort of.
To start with, the pack must fit you, and if it does fit you, the pack will fit your needs, most of the time. It will never work out to be perfect, ever, but close enough is close enough.
If you need to carry more you fudge.
This is known as the Fudge Corollary, a slight addendum to the Goldilocks Theorem, and it is tasty too.
If you end up carrying less than a full load (which is seldom, because you're smart, you thought this through, and you bought the pack that's right for most occasions), you fudge the other way. You know how some people always say that there are two sides to every question? Right. Fools.
Fools. Dopes. Idiots. Saps, chumps, patsys, suckers, mugs, jesters, buffoons, clowns, simpletons. Screaming idiots who are even bad at that. Think bottom-level, sludge-quality screaming idiots. It almost never happens that there are only two sides to anything related to personal taste, politics, religion, philosophy, or backpacking.
However.
This is one time when we can simplify things down to two categories: too much, and too little.
- Too much: On the one hand you need to stuff in more things than you can sanely carry by pushing harder or packing smarter until your pack is so tight that you can play marching music on it, if you have a couple of drumsticks handy.
- Too little: And on the other hand, when you carry next to nothing, the pack feels like a big paper bag with one lonely orange rolling around down at the bottom, in which case you need to compress things tighter and strap them down harder until the pack is all right and solid.
Then you smile and start walking. And adjust as you go. Just go.
– The one true answer. (Truly!) –
Now. The conclusion. But first a question to build suspense.
How many packs do you need and how big should they be, really?
How many packs could a backpacker pack if a backpacker could pack packs?
You're right, that was two questions, and at least one was more irrelevant and stupider than most things here. (But we're wandering, so back to the discussion...)
The seller's version...
Follow standard rules (brought to you by the fine people who want to sell you packs and go home with your money) and you ought to have maybe five packs.
- One pack to hold a wind breaker, water bottle and sandwich, for short day hikes.
- One pack for longer day hikes, and big enough for rain wear, spare socks, the five or 10 or 16 essentials or whatever number they're up to now, a big meal, two or three water bottles, et cetera.
- One pack for two-day weekend backpacking trips. Bigger than a day pack but smaller than a steamer trunk.
- One pack usable for trips of four days, but capable of handling a tight eight day trip (or thereabouts).
- One pack for trips of one to two weeks.
- A pack for death marches, in case you plan to be out more than two weeks (and die on the trail, I guess).
My version (so very reasonable too)...
But, follow a reasonable line of thought and you might end up with two packs. (See? Sounds reasonable already, right?)
- One pack for day hikes, either short or long.
- One pack big enough to carry your gear plus a week's worth of food, if you push hard while loading it.
Following Plan B here (love that phrase), you have only one real backpack, which will be OK for over-nighters, if under-loaded and very slightly baggy for some conditions. Gain experience, drop non-essentials, pack more carefully, and you can get everything you need and two weeks of food stuffed into it or strapped onto the outside. If you are not terminally stupid. And you're not, really. Are you? No.
Really. You're not. I've looked at the photos you sent and would never say anything bad about you. Ever. And neither would my sister. Or her 1200 leering Facebook fiends. (I mean friends.)
Hardly anyone carries food and fuel enough for two weeks. Normally you resupply after a week, at most. Instead of carrying six changes of clothes, take less and freshen up as needed. And leave the lawn chair behind, on the patio, for the cat to nap on.
Use your leftover money for a different kind of pack if you like, as a supplement, as a third option, a backup, whatever. Did you start with a top loader? Add a panel loader and see how it works. Got a smallish frameless pack for most of your schlepping? Try a larger external frame pack for late fall, winter and early spring trips (handier for hauling snowshoes, an ice ax, and a four-season bombproof tent).
Your decision. Mellow out. Don't buy too much up front. Buy more later if needed.
– Now for the real One True Answer! –
The bigger your pack the less intelligent you are.
The smaller your pack, the more intelligent you need to be, and the more experienced you should be before committing to it.
Something like 2500 to 3500 cubic inches (40 to 60 L) is a reasonable middle ground to explore. A pack in this range is going to be pretty good for pretty nearly everyone pretty much most of the time. If you err, try erring on the small side. It's always easier to carry more, somehow, than to forever be stuck with half-filled, rattling void vaguely attached to your backside.
And a bigger pack is always heavier. All the time.
Do the above unless the weather is seriously bad where and when you go backpacking and if you always need to carry serious gear to deal with it. If so, you know about all that. You are already dialed in.
For general three-season backpacking, dealing with some rain and some chilly days and nights, but no blizzards, avalanches, or sub-zero temperatures, a pack on the small side of what the traditionalists recommend is probably right. With a bit of experience you can backpack for a week, in summer, with a starting total pack weight around 20 pounds (9 kg), including food, and end your trip carrying about half that weight, using a pack that will not scare horses or children or cripple you.
Any advertising words like the following about a deluxe (huge and expensive) pack are flat out crazy: For 'maximalist' explorers who put a higher priority on comfort and convenience than they do on weight.
Think about how well explorer goes with comfort and convenience. About as well as adventurous goes with deathbed.
Think about comfort and convenience coexisting with the crushing weight of a huge bag crammed full of useless, expensive, complicated things.
Think wretched excess. Think about your body. Remember, always — you are made of meat, and bruise easily. So go gently.
– Footsie Notes –
1: REI sizing: http://bit.ly/1qrcbX0
2: Kelty sizing: http://bit.ly/1Ac6096
3: Samsonite Cruisair Spinner 29: http://bit.ly/1qra3hN