Story Break
Uncle Pudzer Speaks.
How to go ultralight.
I seen guys like you before, all over. The hills are crawlin with copies of you, like ants. It used to be that you couldnt swing a city boy by his trekkin poles without takin out a couple dozen more.
Little secret here. I used to be like that too. In my own lovely way of course.
Telltale signs: ginormous black blobs staggering around all over, trippin over the shrubbery and swearin a lot, or moanin. Crates and baskets strapped on, all tippy and wigglin around like crazy. Thats you with your pack, Bub. I seen it. I seen you. I seen it all.
First thing you think about, you want to go backpackin, is all them nice little ponds still as glass, all the clean air, the blue skies, snowy mountains all around like you see in a truck ad, and a dragon fly or two and a couple of birds twittering and chirpin off to the side and flittin here and there.
So you figure you will get a truck and drive around until you see a nice little mountain pond with a patch of green grassy meadow tucked in right next to it and the air will be all clear and clean and cool and sparkly, and you will park there and hike 10 feet and set up your tent and have a hell of a time and life will be good and you will come home after that all gnarly and mountain man like.
Nice wet dream Bub.
The first real step you take is start askin around, how do I do this backpackin thing I want to go out and see them mountains and have some fun like everybody else and be close to nature specially as I can drive my truck right there and not even get sweaty and all and your friends are all sittin there with there beer guts hangin over there belt buckles and starin at you like a pig that just farted and never heard that sound before. Kinda still and dopey with wide eyes. Not quite breathin. Mouth open. Not sure what happened or what to do next, none of you, so you all have another beer and talk about the great outdoors and how its so great and all. And about which truck is the best one. And why women cant understand any of it and never will.
And then eventually you have to talk to the experts because this itch is gettin stronger and you have some money and you figure you might as well spend it on gettin out there and havin fun, seein as how you moved from Nowhere, Nebraska to Mountain City, Montana just so you could look up and see them mountains every morning and get out there whenever you wanted and never have no troubles no more with pimples or dandruff or gettin dates, and being free as the wind and a mountain man with hair on your chest, so you do it.
You have your choice of outdoor shops and you pick the one with the biggest parking lot and the most stuff inside, including flashing lights and fine wood paneling and experts swarming all over the sales floor in vests, even if you have to drive 200 miles to get there because its worth it. You can tell they are experts, these people because of the uniforms and since uniforms cost a lot they have to be good for it.
And the next thing you know you are standin by the backpackin wall where there are about 600 hooks and each and every hook has some thing on it and they tell you the experts, that those things there are official backpacks, as used by the pros and by real backpackers and such and each one looks about the size of Grandma Redlayczyk's steamer trunk that came across with her from the old country on a coal powered rusty flakin clanking shakin iron tub of a ship. You have seen this (the trunk) in one of those old brown faded pictures with the spidery hand writing on the back in some gibberish language that those people used to fool with before they came over here and turned into your grand parents.
But you are proud and you dont let on that you are gettin a bit dizzy and startin to pant standin there and tryin to decide what in hell you are lookin at. All you see is a bunch of big lumpy things and bright colors and what looks like lots of belts hangin off the side of each one and wads of plastic buckles and things, you can recognize those at least, and then Todd is there to help you. He is a pro and has a name tag that says Hello my name is Todd and he smiles at you and right there you are not too sure about Todd at all even if he is wearing the uniform. He looks smooth all over, too smooth, and smiles too much a little bit girlie you think, especially for what a backpacker should to be, but you figure you might try talkin to him because you are still bigger than him and you do work all day every day and can pound the snot out of him if he gets funny on you, even a little. So what the hell.
But he sure was not what you expected, he is not even wearing boots at all, just flat shiny shoes. And they are clean like the rest of his clothes. Too clean. Suspicious, this is. This is suspicious here for a start. Has this guy ever been outside at all? Maybe just to let the cat out you think, but he knows more than you do, or so you suspect, you hope, anyway he gets paid to do this and you dont and you want to go backpackin and have fun in those mountains right outside close by there so you talk to him like you know what you are up to even though you dont know diddly and figure you can pick it up as you go along and the next thing you know you are standin outside in the parking lot with about $800 worth of stuff in your arms and then you are havin trouble fitting all of it into your truck but you are sure that you did the only right thing possible under the circumstances and cant wait to get home and try to figure it all out.
Maybe a week goes by, maybe two, and you still have all this stuff laid out in your place on the floor like a big diagram of the life you want to step inside of if you can only figure out which cord to pull to open the front door to it.
You have it laid out just like the cover of that book you got at the libary because you didnt want Todd to see you buying a book at the same store on how to go backpackin but you really needed a clue so you got this book which was written by a guy who wrote this entire book on how to buy stuff and put the one thing inside the other and on top of the other and wrap it all up, and strap it down and get some food and put that in there, and some fuel for the stove (you have this teeny brass stove that looks like a toy but puts out enough heat to smelt iron ore straight from rocks into barbells and it cost a lot but all this stuff does and you want to do it right), and you put plenty of water in those special bottles for backpackin water and all, and on the cover of that book it shows all this stuff laid out right tidy and square like this guy knows what he is up to and he is English or something, a little suspicious also, but came over here for the freedom we alone have and has walked all over hell and back and you want to do that too, though not have to be English if you can avoid it, so you got the book and laid it all out, all your stuff, the same way, and there it is, and now what.
Now so the first thing you did already was unpack every single thing and touch it all and try to figure out what the heck it was and which side was up and why you bought it in the first place and which part of the other thing it was supposed to fit into or latch onto or whatever, and then you put each thing down on the floor all laid out in a square right where it was before and after a while you had your plan.
Some of this stuff is for sleeping in, or on, or under, and some is for the rest. Like for food.
You have a stove, and a cup, and a knife and a fork and a spoon. Then a frypan and a cook pot and a plate, all made for each other so they nest, and then a bottle for the stove fuel and those water bottles for the backpackin water, and still there is more, a lot more.
You have your clothes, special hiker boots and all, with covers for them that go halfway up your legs, and an official bandanna, red, in case you ever have official trouble so you can officially signal to authorized official search parties and aircraft that will be sent out to see to your safe rescue. You have inner clothes, under clothes, over clothes, outer clothes, windy day clothes, warm day clothes, rainy day clothes, all of that. The boots weigh about 6 or 8 pounds, seems like, which appears to be light considering the size of them and all, but heavy considering you have to wear them and all. They feel like they been hacked out of lumps of aged antique wood and about as stiff and lots more expensive than that even. Solid. Thats it. Solid. Solid and expensive.
So you have all your new stuff splayed on the floor in order left to right and top to bottom and after you get tired of touching it and looking at it all and turning it over again and again you play with it and try to figure out how each thing works, or at least figure out why you bought it. You go pretend camping in your head, on the floor.
Then after a while you put water into the backpackin water bottles and have a drink and decide to use the cook kit to heat soup in the kitchen, like you are out in the deep woods far from any cares, like in the olden days when men were real men and it was all clean except for one or two spider webs and an ant or two and you could come face to face with a moose or a bear any time you went to take a leak, not just the whiny cat that follows you to the bathroom every time you go in there now and watches you, but a real, big, dangerous animal with ideas of its own and maybe some plans for what to do with your leftovers after dinner. Its dinner. Meaning you.
And so maybe you plan on a hot drink too, in the kitchen there, on your little stove.
So then you read the little booklet that came with the stove, and then pour out some fuel to burn in it and spend about a week cooking stuff out back. If you can call it cooking, just adding hot water and watching all those little plastic chips swell up and turn into noodles and beefy beef chunks with spice flakes but after a while you have to quit this or go broke or crazy and anyway you start gettin bloaty something fierce from eating it so you go back to good old all American pizza and beer for your day to day nutritional needs but still you play with the stove, making cowboy coffee in the cup and drinking it outside, tryin to get it right so you dont cook all the hide off your tongue every time you have a cup of it, or die from the jitters afterwards.
So you go on like that until you get things figured out or at least you think so and now you are ready to make a real backpackin trip and its only one night and a few miles but it almost kills you so you are sure that you are doing it right because its supposed to hurt, no pain no gain after all, and then you do it again and again until the snow comes and you figure you are a smart boy after all.
Every time you stop to make camp you spend about an hour looking for a flat spot up one side and down the other, and clearing about a eighth acre or so of anything that could get in the way or be lumpy and it feels so damn good to put that pack down when you get there that you know you did a good days trip or else it would not feel so good to stop and then you take everything out of your pack and lay it out and pretty soon you have half the landscape full of your stuff which is OK when no rain is falling but kinda sucky if it is, but thats part of the game you think, and it all works out pretty good for a few years this way though every time you get a new catalog in the mail you look at stuff and try to figure out how you can make it lighter though a 6 pound tent seems to be about as light as you can dare to go and a 5 pound sleeping bag the same, unless you want to try one of those feather bags which everyone warns is a bad deal if you get it wet, though you didnt get wet so far but you are worried that as soon as you try one of those you will get it wet and be in real trouble but life is pretty good never the less, all things considered.
And so it goes, and then you get a little older and you learn a few things, mainly that you dont know a damn thing which partly goes with gettin older and partly goes with gettin smarter and partly goes with startin out thinkin you do know all the answers and you begin to catch on that there is another way to do all this stuff and as crazy as it sounds you do not need to carry all kinds of weight or even a lot of the things that every one says you do need to, including the guy that wrote that book, who is dead now anyway, and the other guys who wrote the other books despite there being published authors and all, and havin there books in libaries and on sale at book stores with there pictures on them inside the back cover. Despite all this, they do not know it all, as impossible as that seems. I know. I know now. It took years for me to figure this out. Life is crazy.
So heres how that works then as I see it.
There is a rule that goes by the name of The Big 3, or the Big Three Plus 1, the big 3 being the tent, the sleeping bag, and the pack, and the 1 being the stove and the cook set and all that stuff.
The big 3 are the 3 things you have as a backpacker that are the heaviest, and biggest and bulkiest and make you hurt the most when you carry them all over the landscape especially if that said landscape is interesting, as you have heard the saying may you live in interesting times, so it is with the landscape, the most interesting being the one with the most personality or attitude, mainly how high does it go and how low does it go, and how many lumps are there, and those are the places that most of us go backpackin if we want the best pictures but require a lot of up and down walking which is extra hard carrying a big pack and lots of stuff in it so heres how it might go.
First you are really dumb and dont know a thing and know you dont know and you fake it for a while and then you read up and talk to people and try stuff and catch on and go with the flow, you get out there in the middle of the middle of the stream, the main stream, and do it all just like every one else and that gives you confidence that you are doing it the right way and will be safe and happy and no one will laugh at you and it will work out.
So then you have caught on and you are now an expert too and if there is ever a question you know the answer because you read the book, or you read all of the books, and many magazine articles, and bought the right things from real official stores and went backpackin and came home again and mastered all of the knobs and buckles and dials and the other flight controls of every piece of all your equipment and you know each and every one of the manufacturers of everything thats ever used for backpackin like tents and packs and boots and sleeping bags and so on, and a lot of it you have tried personally and spent real money on, sometimes trying one thing and then another, or from one manufacturer and another and back again and so it goes, and you just about know it all and so you are smart and have made some mistakes on purpose just to test the rules but mostly thought things through and made a small change here or there but stayed right in line with the way things are done and you have been gettin by. Which makes you a expert.
And then maybe one day you meet some loony who is doing everything wrong, or you read about one or two of them and you wonder why they would be so nuts and how they could manage to do it all wrong and still live because you know if you want to go backpackin for a week you have to carry 60 pounds or more, maybe like 70 and here is some nut walking around with half that or less and not dying every day and you write that sucker off. Hes dead meat by tomorrow afternoon, latest.
Maybe years go by, maybe only months but you are conservative because you really know what works and what does not work, and you keep seein these random single loony-tuners who keep not dyin but you are sure any day now it will happen but it dont and you keep reading up on there exploits and after a while, one day for no reason you can figure out you realize you may know it all but you are bored and you are not havin fun any more and you are carrying a whole lot of weight around and you think maybe you will just try being dangerous for a little bit once and then the whole world collapses in on you and you realize that you do not know every thing at all and maybe not much of anything at all and there is a complete entire whole new way of doing all this and you too can get by with say 25 pounds for a week of backpackin, excluding water which you can pick up when and where you need it.
So bam, another door opens just like that.
From there it is like being 12 years old again, when you did not know a damn thing and the world was this wide big thing like the first time you saw a camp ground when you got out of the car and all you wanted to do was run wild and go nuts and explore everything, and you did and your parents were yelling at you back at the car to come back and be careful and you just did not care and so you ran and ran and they were mad later but you loved it and you lived and you learned a lot just by running around nuts like a little kid, which you were, and thats how you feel now and you want to do the same thing some more.
So thats what you do and it changes you.
Here is step 1. Cashier your tent. This is the big item, the one that causes the most grief, your home on the range. Your refuge, your sanctuary, your little zippered hidey hole where you can crawl inside and shut out the whole big wild world and be safe.
It is the single biggest thing you carry around, the tent. If you are like most people you think that a 2 person tent is the smallest tent that will work for 1 person so thats what you have. It used to be in the old days not that long ago that the lightest tent like this you could get was 6 pounds, about, minimum, like I said.
Well, things changed. Things are a whole lot lighter now, more radical. You can now get by about a pound lighter, 5 pounds, amazing but true, so this tent is still the most heavy thing you carry. Start here.
Whatever you need you can do it. Buy a tarp or a tarptent or make one, you can make one out of some 3 mil plastic sheeting and play with it and that might be good enough, who knows? You do. Try it. Even that heavy plastic sheeting is light next to a double wall tent. Be generous, cut a 8 by 10 piece out of it and put a couple guy lines on it and cut a ground cloth to sleep on and you are still under a pound and ½. So you can save 3 to 4 pounds right off the bat, assuming you started with a light tent, or save even more if you are one of those nuts who takes a whole 4 person tent for your self alone, like a dome tent, which I have seen people do. Some people are more gnarly than I am, hard to believe, even some females who should of known better.
Plenty of small tarps on the scene these days. Tarp is not a bad word, only 4 letters in that word but not bad ones, good ones. Even a whole 8 by 10 silnylon tarp is only a pound, and you can get your self under that, and a cow, or yourself and 6 to 8 raccoons and a whole family of mice besides. Plenty of room for all. Silnylon is new stuff, pretty near, it is only really light nylon fabric impregnated if I may use that word with some kind of space age silicone stuff that soaks in and makes it water proof but does not hardly increase the weight much at all, and it is light, and does not peel off. You can make tarps or tents out of it, or buy ones that other people made and it is sweet. Done.
Step 2, get a reasonable sleeping bag. Maybe you have a reasonable one. Like a safe one. A 5-pounder, all puffy synthetic fill with that nice synthetic smell. Keeps you warm. In a flood you could float away and down the river and not wake up until mid morning when the sun got too hot, and otherwise not notice a thing, do a Mr Floatie all the way to the sea and not even get soggy just bob like a happy cork.
Fine for you, but. You can go a whole bunch lightern that.
One way is to put your faith in feathers. Little tiny birds, did you ever wonder how they can sleep outside naked all night? It is the feathers. Birds do not wear pants. No vests, no parkas, they all go commando style and live to cheep about it. It is the feathers, boys.
It dont take much. Try a down bag. Lots available now, 1 pound, 2 pounds, ought to be plenty to pick from. Good enough for most. Save another 3 or 4 pounds over your puffy synthetic bag and probly be warmer at the same time, it packs smaller too. Not much need to fret over gettin wet. Down bags dont work so good wet (neither does any other bag, come to mention it). Down bags you cant wring out and fake it, pretend you are OK, they take forever to dry, but figure in this - how many times do you get a sleeping bag wet? Think about that. If this is you, out there gettin a sleeping bag wet all the time, you really want to think if you should be doing something else. In the last 30 years I got my sleeping bag wet exactly 0 times. Down works fine. Light, poofy, cozy, warm. Dont wet your bed and you will be fine, is all, and you shouldnt be doin that anyways. Not around me you shouldnt.
So by this point you saved 6 to 8 pounds and hardly did anything. You can feel that. Startin to feel like real weight has gone missing. You dropped the double wall tent and then replaced your sleeping bag. Only two things you done and look at that.
Next.
The subject we have all waited for. The 3rd of the 3, the pack. You can take a tarp out for a test spin. No need to go far you just go. Back yard is fine if you have one, and it is free of lizards and motorcycle racers and most firearms. Take your tent and your tarp and set up both. And your new sleeping bag, maybe the old one too, if you want. Sleep in the new tarp in the new bag and leave the big old tent there set up with the big old sleeping bag in it just idling all night like a sweet V8 Cummins diesel and if you have a problem it is all right, you can crawl over and crawl in and turn up the heat and watch the fuzzy dice sway gently until you fall asleep again. It is not only OK it is smart, and being in the dark no one can see you anyway, or wants to sit up all night and watch to see what happens, if you are in the back yard. Do this a time or 2 and you have your new system pretty near worked out, all thats left is the new pack.
Which can be a bunch smaller now, the pack, by leaving out the bulk of the old tent and the old sleeping bag. Because you are carrying less weight and less bulk you can have a smaller pack and one that does not need so much support. Maybe no frame at all but thats a personal choice. Certainly it is up to you. Especially if you are coming out of a long term relationship with a frame pack say 20, 30 years, this will be a big change. You can go from 5 or 6 pounds for the pack down to 1 in 1 big smooth jump. It is not unheard of. Even some light packs have a little bit of stiffener inside, maybe an ounce or 2, thats OK. Hardly matters next to several pounds, or maybe your sleeping pad works OK as a frame and thats OK too, you can go even lighter with that. You can try that and see how you feel.
So say your old pack was 5 pounds and the new one is 1 pound. So now you saved 10 to 12 pounds overall, with the tent and the sleeping bag, and the pack added up, and the first trip you go on you will not believe it at all, you will be singin with joy no doubt about it, and you will never want to go back, either home or to heavy backpackin.
So thats The Big 3. The next step is if you have a big stove and a bunch of pots. Specially a white gas stove, some people still have those, but even the canister stoves are heavy. Stove and a canister of gas, at least a pound, all added up. Dont sound like much but wait a couple seconds and keep reading. Thick aluminum pot, half a pound (stainless steel is even more if you are nuts enough to carry it or bring one along to swat mice with).
So an alcohol stove is something to try.
Try it it wont hurt you dont have to stay with it just try it and sort out your thoughts later but it is worth a try at least, so do that.
You can make one, an alcohol stove, or buy them all over now, not like it was even 6 or 8 short years ago, and it will come in at a quarter ounce to a ½ ounce. Use an aluminum cup to heat water in, or a small and light pot, find something you like, the right size and shape and cost, or even use one of those big beer cans, 25 fluid ounces and so light empty it almost floats away on the air, and fun to empty out before use, or an old tomato can, its not that heavy even if it is steel. All around you can save another pound or more just between the stove and cooking utensils, specially if you get 1 plastic spoon and leave the rest out entirely.
And then from there you can cut back some more. Take a 3 blade jack knife or versus takin a single edge razor blade? Take a cotton towel or take nothing? Take a pillow or use spare clothes? Like that. Think it through.
After a while you can drop another 3 — 4 pounds of stuff you never use or take things that are not so heavy or that can do more than one thing. Use your imagination and after a while you have re-invented the whole sport of backpackin and can go places and do things you never expected. You can get to be a gnarly old happy fart and dance along the trail whistlin, lettin your tail switch around behind you with joy while watchin all them others grunt and sweat and stumble around havin to take dangerous baby steps under those enormous packs.
Go ahead, make them think your stupid. The jokes on them, Bub.
(Note on the so-called metric: take any figure above and either divide by 2 or multiply. It sorta gets you close. In case your one a them.)