Your Fair Weather Friend
Using A Pack In Good Conditions.
– Dreaming the impossible dream. –
Some people backpack only when the weather is perfect. They remain in training year round, senses taut, ever vigilant for the arrival of those few hours when the planets snick into alignment, when the sun is smiling genially, the skies are a rich shade of impeccable blue, the wind hovers near nonexistent, the bugs are on vacation, and children, spouses, relatives, and friends are all looking the other way. Then they roar out of town, down the road, intent on capturing those few hours of exact bliss, to return home self-satisfied and gloating about the wonderful experience they had, with a wad of pictures to prove it.
There are places, and whole years, when this never happens, and that makes for the perfect excuse. If the weather is not perfect then obviously you can't go backpacking, and if the weather is lousy the whole year, well, then you have a self-renewing excuse, and trailless life stretches ahead to infinity, like one big couch lined with pillows and overflowing with chips.
It's true that if you hit a good day, or a stretch of a few good days, you can have a lot of fun.
Life is nice if it's fun every now and then, as opposed to never. Never gets to be tedious. On the other hand, perfection is one side of the coin. There is no perfection without its opposite, which is some degree of confusion, accident, evil temper, pain, misery, and toothache.
So if you get out fairly often you come to appreciate the good days so much more, because you are constantly reminded what the others are like. You also find value in stumbling around in the dark, ending up dripping wet, shivering with cold, covered in flies, going hungry, and finishing with a fractured tibia or two, because that makes coming home alive to a quiet place where there is clean running hot water and a bed whose insect population is zero all the more reassuring.
– No wind, and not a hint of rain either. –
Those days when the weather is dry and sunny are the best, no doubt about that.
Not too hot, not too cold. Earth is orbiting the sun at about the right distance. If Earth strayed a bit closer, or wandered a tad farther out, we'd be sizzling like bacon on a griddle or blue and frosty forever in the deepy dark of freeziness. The same rule applies to the space our solar system fills in the galaxy.
The Milky Way is not a fun place, not every part of it.
The Milky Way is not just our own private misty smear across the sky, brimming with gloriously colored stars in a conveniently black sky. Not hardly. It is screaming with x-rays and gamma rays, and ripping with tidal forces and colliding stars, black holes, howling clouds of incandescent gas and all kinds of things we haven't even discovered yet, or only found out about all too recently, like that madly spinning pre-supernova Wolf-Rayet star, WR104, which is a mere 8000 light years away, its prickly north pole pointed directly at us. The very star which could collapse at any second and turn into a super duper whooper nova known as a gamma ray burster and incinerate the Earth and everything on it by shooting a ginormous death ray out its south pole, but more importantly, out its north pole too. The one that is aimed at us. 1
Since these Incinerat-O-Rays travel at the speed of light, exactly the same speed as any warning signs, our first clue would be all of us exploding into clouds of buzzing-hot ions while the surface of the earth was blasted down to bare rock, with nothing left of the atmosphere, the oceans, soil, forests, cities, sparkly lakes, restaurants, parks, or tidy gated communities but a few depressingly insignificant wisps of gas whooshing off into space like flocks of pigeons startled by a backfiring truck engine.
So, in short, we have it pretty good right at the moment, though for backpacking, some days are always going to be better than others.
But as with most of life, when things are good you don't have a lot to talk about, which generally works out fine. Living in interesting times has too many drawbacks to become popular with everyone.
Sometimes it is nice to get up a little late in the morning, and take a few extra minutes with breakfast, and then to go off walking at an easy pace with no urgent deadline in mind. Sure, you still have to get somewhere in a reasonable amount of time, but if you are healthy, in good shape, have food and water (and good enough weather) then you know it's going to work out.
On the other side of the coin, you've probably been out when making tracks, making the right number of tracks at the right speed and in the right direction for the right amount of time means you won't die right now, probably, or even today, probably, but will manage to survive, even if miserably, all day and through the succeeding night, and have a decent chance of making it home again, eventually. Which works too, if it works, but is more interesting because it is more stressful.
– Being mediocre in excellent times. –
What this all amounts to is that during good times you have a lot of slack.
If evolution has taught us anything at all, it's that tough times create excellent results. All those tens of thousands of millennia of living in the small dark spaces between rocks where dinosaurs didn't think to look, or were simply too huge to bother with, gave us mammals quick wits and adaptability as well as small beady eyes and a taste for crunchy insects. We managed, and well. Just look where the dinosaurs are now. That should tell you all you need to know.
But when things get a little better, or a lot better, better than you have any right to hope for, you can kick back and still get by. That's why nice weather is nice. You can turn off your higher intellectual functions and decline to the comfortable days of being a lizard again. Sleep late, move slowly, spend lots of time enjoying the warm sun. It doesn't equip you to be a survivor, but while the weather is nice, everyone is a survivor, without expending any effort at all.
Backpacking on nice days is not for Type A personalities. Backpacking on nice days is for Type L personalities. Continue asking yourself What would a lizard do? and you'll be fine. As long as the weather holds. There really isn't a lot to worry about.
Just keep the basics in mind (if you can be bothered to remember them) and proceed on auto pilot.
In fact, short trips in good weather are fine times to prepare for the worst, in a way. Times when you can build up good habits while you have plenty of time to fumble with false starts.
You can work on setting up and breaking camp without hurting yourself or losing anything, like your flashlight. Or one of your hind legs. So start then with the big things, which are easier to keep track of.
Say it's later in the afternoon and you plan to set up camp and goof off for a while, and enjoy watching evening slowly descend on the world. Good choice, especially if, when you empty your pack, you find that your tent is still with you. If you can get through a multi-day trip and not lose (a) your pack, or (b) your sleeping bag, or (c) your food, stove, and fuel, or (d) your tent, you are doing pretty well, especially if backpacking is new to you.
You get extra points if you manage NOT to lose pack, sleeping bag, food, fuel, stove, AND tent all on one trip. In other words, let's say, if you lose nothing equal to or greater than one quarter of your body weight. This is good. Mediocre, but good.
A depressing fact, other than that we have this gigantic and unstable star's business end pointed right at us and may be instantaneously zapped into clouds of dissociated molecules, unremarkable except for a lingering whiff of burned skin and overcooked fat, is that mediocre does not mean bad. Mediocre means sort of average, in an uninteresting way. Not unpleasant at all, only uninteresting. Adequate, if you're willing to settle for C-minus.
Mediocre does not mean easy, either. You might actually need lots of practice to get all the way up to the bottom edge of mediocrity. And good days are good for that. Practice now and prepare to advance into the ranks of the survivors.
– Make my expectations petite. –
Once you have been able to travel through the back country without losing any major body parts whatsoever, or, say, even your pack or boots, you can keep practicing so you get even better than that. (Yes, it is possible.) Among some people it is thought that the major accomplishment of an overnight backpacking trip is to simply return home alive, but better results are achievable. Really. Even by you, without too much effort. Also really.
But you know that. By now you have returned home not only alive but in reasonably good health with an acceptable number of fingers and toes remaining, and all your gear too. Good for you there, but remain humble if possible. Take it easy. Keep fine tuning your level mediocrity. It's good enough for now, but it won't always be so.
Keep at that habit building.
Now that you know you won't have to replace your pack every time you go out, and know that you won't constantly lose track of your tent and need to keep replacing that, you can begin to employ your higher faculties, and concentrate on refining your game. Keep the trips short but try not to lose your car keys. Or socks. Or your glasses. If you don't wear glasses then pick something else to worry about. Then get so good that you can keep track of everything and finish a trip of a day or two without actually worrying much. Or losing anything at all.
After a while backpacking reduces from a challenge requiring all your intelligence to a discipline requiring dedication (and some minor fretting) to a mindless habit.
Mindlessness. That's what we're looking for.
Once you achieve that you are thoroughly mediocre, which puts you in the middle of the herd. Not bad for a few days' work. The middle of the herd is a safe place. It gives you a cushy buffer. If any tyrannosaurs do show up, they'll nibble around the edges first, but you won't be there, because you have put yourself well away from those unpredictable edges where danger customarily looks for its snacks.
Good weather is great for developing feelings of comfort and adequacy. Remember to check the weather report, pick a place you are already comfortable with, take it easy, travel only with people who have never had more than moderately homicidal feelings toward you, and remain humble. With that, plus a season or two, you become adequate.
So give yourself a bronze star. (The little paper ones with adhesive on the back are fine. Lick one and stick it on the wall.)
– Longer than you expected, –
less interesting than you feared.
After a season or two of backpacking, after you have learned to feel comfortable lying on the ground in a sleeping bag, spending hours in the dark completely defenseless against the resident predators, you should try some longer trips.
Go ahead, push your luck. Instead of an overnight trip, or one lasting only two days, try a long weekend. Three days and two nights, or four days and three nights, or up to one week.
Pleasant weather is just as good for these trips as for shorter ones. It will teach you a lot, while still remaining pleasant. You get to make mistakes with little or no penalty, and if you are the right kind of person you get to make the same mistakes over and over until you finally learn, or until you get bored, or the gods decide that you really are an insufferably superfluous twit and need to be made an example of. They all work.
In fact, if you don't have anything in particular to prove, and are just out to have a good time, and don't mind wasting a bunch of your annual vacation pointlessly mucking around in the dirt, then a week-long backpacking trip in fine weather is great.
The issues you face are minimal. You don't need to worry about getting too wet, or too cold, too hot or too dry. These are good times to experiment with different foods, or new shelters or bedding, or new locations, or new companions. Stress on your pack will be light, which is good, and likewise for stress on your skills and on your body.
Since the weather isn't really hot or muggy, you won't be sweating that much, and your pack will stay cleaner.
If you make reasonably short trips you won't be pushing it.
It is also possible that, unlike what happens during a several-month-long trip, your pack won't see a lot of ground-in dirt. These are all good things. Relatively short trips in relatively good weather are great times to find problems with your pack's comfort level, ability to carry loads, or its quality of manufacture, not to mention your true feelings about backpacking.
If you decide that backpacking is interesting, and have survived a few days at a time, and you move on to a couple of week-long trips, you'll be surprised at how comfortable you can be. Once you work out the basics and lose the idea that you have to protect yourself from the land, you can ease into lightweight and ultralight backpacking, which put more strain on your planning, require more intelligence up front, and more attentiveness on the trail. You'll be able to move through the landscape with less fear and more joy, feeling more a part of it and not so much like an intruder. More at home and less at threat.
These are good feelings.
Don't screw up.
– Footsie Notes –
1: A real death star: http://bit.ly/1tZtf2q