Load Me Up
Getting Choosy, Load-Wise.
– Feed the beast. –
Sometimes you choose. Sometimes you are chosen. Maybe being chosen is better. As with all things, experience helps, though experience can be expensive, and leave you scarred. But if you find yourself chosen, then you can simply go with it, and it may work out better. Less ego, more humility, more openness.
Sometimes.
Winston Churchill once said, "Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities." A lot of life is like that. You do the thinking and the planning up front, then make a choice. And then you find out how very wrong you are, and exactly why. And maybe you repeat the whole cycle again and again until finally. You have it.
Maybe the main thing to know about how a pack gets loaded is to keep it as simple as possible. Unless you really know what you are getting into. In which case you already know, so buzz off again.
Life is uncertain enough without setting traps for yourself. Traps is what you get with complexity. The more ways there are for a thing to trip you up, the more often it will make you fall on your face.
Stay simple and sleep well. Do not tempt evil by pulling its tail. This is the main thing to keep in mind about packs. And everything else, especially large, predatory cats. And demons.
Demons. Don't get me started.
Luckily most pack makers have made it easy, the loading thing.
Most packs load from the top. This isn't always the best way but it is easy to make a simple and strong pack using this formula. Put things in at the top and they automatically want to stay inside, because of gravity. Gravity notices what you have done and sees that it is good. Gravity then blesses your work by doing most of it for you. Because it likes you, does gravity, for you are being ordinary and predictable, and not being a smartass, and so you don't need to worry, unless gravity is in a playful mood that day and decides to pull your pants down while you're not looking.
Loading any other way than from the top is more complicated, and the universe has been known to frown on anything but The One True Way.
Also known as The Lazy Bastard's Way.
Yes.
The universe really was designed by a couch potato. The universal all-seeing, all-knowing, transcendent Great Potatohead.
Just like you but more so. And having super powers.
There is only one major choice aside from top loading, and that is panel loading (with a front loading pack).
Packs like this (front loading panel loaders) have a big flap on the front that zips open and shut. You can lay the pack down flat on its shoulder straps, open it, and mess around. But you are also dependent on zippers (or even less reliable fasteners). A panel can let go when a seam gives out or a zipper rips. You can have either a huge failure or a little one. Maybe only a few of your smallest and most precious things fall out. Like your camera. Or your lucky dice. Maybe more. You get to find out, miles down the trail, and hours too late.
A ripped seam on a top loader is bad enough on the trail, but it is likely to be a different experience.
First, it will be an actual ripped seam. It won't be a wimpy zipper silently but suddenly splitting open. You will know about a ripped seam. You will either make it rip when you fall or when you screw up some other way, or it will start coming undone little by little, and will keep coming undone little by little before things get desperate. But a seam won't suddenly cut loose unless you force the issue. Zippers not so much.
Second, you can patch a seam. Easily. A needle, some dental floss, and a few stitches will get you home. Even a needle is optional, if you can poke holes with something else and push the floss through the holes.
Try that with a zipper? No, not so much there either.
– Loading. –
A panel loader is easier to load because you don't have to wrestle the pack with one hand while trying to feed it with the other. The ground supports the pack because the pack is lying down flat. During the day, on the trail, a panel loader makes it easier to get at things. No need to unload the whole pack to get out something near the bottom. Unzip, pull out what you want, then rezip. Done. Tidy and quick.
Most panel loaders are hybrids though. They have a top compartment that opens up like a top loader, and a bottom compartment that opens to the front (the side away from your body when you wear the pack). A few packs allow full access to one big compartment by two routes — from either the top or the front. No matter though, panel loaders are never as sturdy as top loaders. They can't be, because each opening in the side of a pack is much less secure than a well-sewn bag with tight seams and a simple hole at the top.
– Option three: something else. –
Moonbow Gear's Gearskin, mentioned before, illustrates one alternate route.
The whole pack is a single flap of fabric that unfolds like a soft taco shell. Lay your things on the half with the shoulder straps, which is conveniently supported by the solid ground, fold the other half up over it, and squeeze it together with compression straps running up each side. It's simple and sturdy, and compression holds things in. Most of the time. Depending on what you are carrying, and how you load it. This is not the solution to every problem but it is one of the simplest and most rigid frameless packs available.
Or you can design and make your own pack.
But no matter what, you have a bag and need a way to get your stuff into that bag, and there is not an infinite number of possibilities, so choose the loading option that seems best and select from the packs that offer it, or pick a nice pack and let it dictate how you need to load it.
– And so, you have just learned… –
Pretty much nothing, be we had to get past it.