A Pack A Day
Multiple levels of usefulness.
– How to do it, then. –
Backpacks aren't good only for torturing your body day after tedious day.
Because Yes folks! you can also use your capacious pouchlike buddy as a day pack. No folks, you can't hoard time by stuffing it into your pack. We don't mean you can stuff days into it for later use. And then carry them around, but.
But. The term day pack means a pack used during a day, or for one day.
Our less cool buddies who are not backpackers hike one day at a time, and then drink, sleep, procreate, write sonatas, or stare open-mouthed at the sky in between hikes. No matter what they carry, it's a day pack because they hike for only one day at a time and then do something else. Even if they hike Saturday and again on Sunday they bail out in between, and go home or somewhere else clean, and do not lie down in the dirt overnight like we do.
We, the true backpackers, can do that daytime thing too but we pride ourselves on sleeping in the dirt, and not bathing that often, and eating food out of bags, and being away from home for anything from two days to forever.
And it is a well-justified pride. Though every now and then every backpacker gets to itching for something less impressive, like a day hike, so here's how you can handle that.
If you are an ultralighter you have it pretty easy. You already have a small pack.
Day packs, those packs specifically made for one day trips, are smaller than traditional backpacks. They are also lighter. Ultralight packs are lighter than regular backpacks too, but they can be as small as day packs, or even smaller, and will usually be lighter than day packs, but will still hold more and carry better because they are designed to be real backpacks.
If you are an ultralighter you have an ultralight backpack and you can use that as a day pack.
Generally this might not be quite ideal but it will work. Not ideal because day packs are made to be kicked around. That's one reason they are heavier than ultralight backpacks. Another is that they usually have more built in padding and a more definite structure, so they stand up straighter all by themselves. These qualities are fine for a day pack.
A little extra weight spread over six or eight hours doesn't matter. Trade that off for a more durable pack which doesn't carry all that much but which does sit up by itself, and stays open when you dig around in it, and holds some kind of shape even when it's empty, and it's not that bad.
But you can use your backpack for that too.
Even better. Say you go out somewhere, set up camp, and decide to stay there for a couple of days and explore.
You would have to be pretty dumb to drag along an extra pack to use only for a mid-trip day hike, though there are those that do this. Some packs have detachable top pockets that convert to fanny packs but that adds extra weight and complexity.
You don't need that, do you? Use your backpack instead. A small backpack makes a fine enough day pack. Using a one pound backpack, which you already have, is better than carrying a six pound (three kg) monster backpack, and also taking along an extra two pound (one kg) day pack, just in case.
If you want to get tricky, and you make your own packs, go ahead and design a backpack that comes apart. You can still have it light, and the part that comes off can serve as a fanny pack, or an over-one-shoulder bag. You don't need much to go stomping around for a few hours in the middle of the day. Room enough for a water bottle and a few bites of food is plenty.
– Dealing with crud. –
This has two parts.
One is on you and the other is you.
Every now and then you will want to do laundry. You get tired of wearing clothes that shed a constant dandruff of dirt and sweat and throw of clouds of stink. Your pack can help.
Take your dirty clothes and put them into the pack. Find your soap and bring that, and get some water. Then use your pack to go off somewhere away from any lake, pond, or stream, and launder things. Don't forget to take water.
A large plastic bag works for this, preferably a tough one.
First, rinse. Put your dirty clothes into the bag, add water, and moosh the clothes around, then dump out the water and take out the clothes. Squeeze the excess water out of the clothes (without wringing them, which is really hard on the fabric). Then lay the wet clothes aside for a bit. A mossy place is nice. You don't especially want to lay wet clothes in the dirt, but on top of a downed log or some bushes is OK.
Now that you have a lot of the goop rinsed out of your dirty clothes, put some soap into the plastic bag, add water, and mix. Then toss in the clothes and go back to mooshing. Finding the right balance of clothes, soap, water, and the number of moosh cycles comes with experience. You ought to have some suds at first but not too many.
When you get tired, dump out the wash water and squeeze each piece of clothing (remember, don't wring out anything — it stretches the fabric). Then rinse, and repeat the rinsing you get tired of it. Squeeze one last time, and hang up the clothes to dry.
Hammockers come out ahead because they have a built in clothesline at each end of the hammock, but you can carry a short length of line for this. In fact you should have one already, in your possibles bag.
– Person! Uncrudify thyself! –
Pretty much the same procedure as above works for bathing, except you don't put yourself into a plastic bag, and there is no squeezing allowed. Remember, your pack is your buddy. Use it to carry water bottles, soap, clean clothes, and whatever serves as a washcloth or towel for you, and footwear. Even a small plastic bag works to stand on, to keep your feet out of the mud, if you don't have any wading shoes for stream crossings.
The simplest bath is a quick rinse in plain water. It works. Use one hand to pour water on yourself while rubbing with your free hand to wash the old sweat away. Then get dry. This helps amazingly well and is infinitely nicer than a sponge bath.
But some days it's too cold for this, so then go with a sponge bath.
For a combination towel and washcloth, a square of thick fleece works well. The size depends on you but a piece a foot square (30 by 30 cm) is about the max. Fleece is a little abrasive, which helps scrub you clean even without soap, and fleece dries fast. Crud is also easy to rinse out of it. You can buy a smallish piece of fleece at a fabric shop and cut it down. If you do you'll then have enough for life.
Get the fleece wet, rub on your body, rinse out the fleece and repeat until you've covered everything that counts. As noted a generous sluicing rinse with plenty of water is much better but a sponge bath beats not bathing at all.
The next step up, as a third option, is to wash your head and crotch and rinse the rest. You need more time and preferably non-freezing weather or water temperature for this. Really cold water works but will give you a headache followed by a crotch ache. (You've been warned.)
First get your hair wet, wash it and rinse. You can lather your face too or do that in the next step. Use a large water bottle as a reservoir and a drinking cup or smaller, rigid bottle for the rinsing. One good round with plenty of soap might be enough to get you squeaky clean. If not, do it again. Warmer days and warmer water encourage repetition.
Dr Bronner's liquid soap is good. It works in all kinds of water, is about as pure as you can get, and has no odd synthetic chemicals. If you haven't heard about it then go look it up.
Splash enough water into your hair to get it wet, wet your face, and then soap up. Use one hand to dispense small amounts of water as a hair rinse while using the other hand to squeegee water through your hair. Stop when the soap is gone. Use a little more water to rinse your face (with the same technique), and then use your square of fleece or a shirt to dry your eyes enough to see.
So once your head is done, wash your crotch then do a simple rinse from your neck down, pouring with one hand and rubbing with the other, using generous amounts of water. After this, sort of squeegee yourself off with your hands followed by your square of fleece, and sun dry if you can.
Without sun, or when it's chilly or windy, just dress in your cleanest clothes as quickly as you can. It helps to do this right after you get up in the morning, when you're still warm, or right after you stop hiking, another time when you're still warm. You can recover pretty quickly either way as long as you get those clothes on fast enough.
– Halfway measures and the luxury edition. –
A good half step below a full wash on cool breezy days is to wet wash head and crotch and sponge off the rest of yourself.
You can stay fully dressed while you wash your head, then, while keeping your lower half covered, sponge off your torso and put on a clean shirt. Finally have at your crotch and sponge your legs. You can do all this without getting a serious chill. Head and crotch are not nearly as sensitive to cold as your torso and abdomen, which you can pretty well keep covered most of the time by using this technique.
On those warm days when you have lots of both water and time, and want to get fancy, wash your whole body with soap. Follow the head-and-crotch pattern. First do your head. This is good especially if you wear glasses. Get the head done and towelled off then put the glasses back on so you can see what the heck you're doing the rest of the way down.
Anyway, do your head then carry on down the line, first wetting then washing shoulders, torso, abdomen, hips, crotch, legs, and feet. Remember, first do a light rinse, then soap up. Then rinse generously from the top down and you end up totally clean. Wipe down with your tiny towel to remove excess water, and finish by air drying and dressing in clean clothes.
If you need to do laundry too, now is a good time. The exercise of laundering will rewarm you, if you need it. As noted it is a good idea to bathe right after you've stopped hiking, when your body is plenty warm. You won't get a serious chill and you'll get the most important work done first. After all, you can do laundry any time, and eat any time, and set up camp any time, but chilly breezes can discourage you from bathing if you put it off too long.
– Thinking inside the bag. –
Beyond housekeeping your pack has some deeply useful qualities. The two big ones are carrying variable weights and carrying variable volumes.
When you need your pack to be full to the gills you learn how hard it can be to pack. If the load is also heavy then things get even harder.
When you are full up then every single time you load the pack you really have to pay attention. Each corner of the pack will be needed. Each corner will have to be in balance with the rest of the pack. Your pack can handle it. The problem is you. It takes thought and it takes experience to get this right. You will suffer if you do it wrong.
We've covered pack loading before, but here's a quick refresher.
Ordinarily weight should be high, centered between your shoulders, with the heaviest things close to your back. On rough ground, shift the weight down toward your hips. Keep it tight. If you have a hip belt, use that to take weight off your shoulders. Use adjustment straps to trim up the pack's balance. When a pack is full to bursting, then balance is especially important.
For more normal but still full loads, or when your pack is full but light you are in the sweet zone. You don't need to work so hard to get everything in, in exactly the right order, nestled into exactly the right spot. You won't hurt all day with straps cutting into you and tugging every which way, trying to crush you. Life will be mellow. You still need to pay attention but loading the pack won't take all of your attention.
Very light loads are no problem at all, but an almost empty pack is hard. This is like the opposite of a screaming big load but with some of the same problems. You're more likely to see this situation while using your backpack as a day pack.
It runs like this: You have a pack that's big enough to carry everything you need for a week or two, but you only want to carry a water bottle, a few snacks, a wind breaker, and a pocket camera. This gets awkward. Gets goofy. You end up with a few relatively hard, lumpy and small pieces at the bottom of the pack, which then hangs from your shoulders like an old sock. Especially so if this is a frameless pack.
You can benefit from a top pocket that covers the top of the pack, and which will hang at about shoulder height. Depending on the pack you might be able to put everything in there and have a sort of shoulder-height fanny pack, which could be better than having everything in saggy lump at waist level.
– Use your strap expertise. –
Another trick is to use that extra strap or two that you brought along. Spare webbing straps, remember?
Put your goods into the pack, with the wind breaker as padding to protect your back, and use the webbing straps to cinch the pack up like a window blind so its bottom is no longer just hanging there and bumping against your behind. Now your main worry is making sure the water bottle remains closed so your camera stays dry, but that's another issue.
The focus with a very light or almost empty pack will be your shoulders. The hip belt becomes irrelevant, since if the pack is hanging loose like a rag anyway, the hip belt has nothing to hold up. And the weight is so small that it doesn't really matter either. You want the pack to hang from your shoulders and stay snuggled against your body, so in this case you can use the sternum strap to good effect.
– Running on empty. –
Probably the easiest carry is a totally empty pack. Easy except it's all flappy. Weight is no problem at all.
You have no worries about arranging things, or having them bang around. But you do have what amounts to a light piece of cloth barely attached to your body, and the lighter the pack, the thinner the material it's made from, and the less control you have over it.
This usually doesn't matter since any time your pack is empty you won't be carrying it far. Or, to put it in reverse, if you're not going far you won't be carrying it for long. All OK.
Except sometimes. Like if it's really windy, or you are in brush, or there are thorns. Not world shaking issues, but they can bug you. So.
You can try rolling up your pack. Make a tight cylinder out of it, then use a spare strap or two to keep it rolled up, and then sling the whole thing over one shoulder (purse style), or around your neck and over one shoulder (messenger bag style). If you do that then you have a small package that's easy to keep under control and out of the way.
You can hang it high, right around shoulder height, or let it nestle under one arm. You won't suddenly be jerked to a halt by this loose flappy thing floating around behind and getting stuck to the landscape. It won't have a chance to.
Just a couple of thoughts, but maybe worth trying. Even if you are seriously ultralight, taking an extra webbing strap or two can prevent a bunch of grief.
– Nestled among your puffy breast. –
What else can you do with your pack?
Get some comfort from it.
Not the comfort of knowing that you have a sturdy and reliable friend stuck on your back, holding all your possessions, all your calories, your home, your bed, everything. That is always true.
This is another kind of comfort. You can use your pack as a pillow.
Never put your butt on an ultralight pack. Sit on your pack and you will kill it.
Light packs are not made to take abuse, and sitting on it is abuse. But you can lean on it a little.
Stop for a break, a snack, a drink. Sit down, put the pack between you and the hillside, and you have a reassuring backrest. A comfortable backrest. A comfort. This is a small thing but it's worth reminding ourselves that a pack has more than one or two uses, and this is one of the alternates. But go easy on it. Just lean, don't sit.
So?
Overnight then. Why bother spending $49.95 for some dopey marketing ploy disguised as a backpacker's pillow? Use your pack.
If you need to. You have it, it's there, you can make it soft or firm. You can change its shape to suit yourself, it adds no weight to your kit, and you get to add another type of use to your multiple use list.
Pillow. Remember that. For $49.95 you can buy a week's worth of food. Think how far you can go on that.
Now think again.
Redefine pillow and you get more uses. Your head and your back aren't the only parts of you that can use some pillowy softness. Think legs. Think feet. Think knees.
When you stop, maybe you need more than to stop walking and sit. Maybe you need to lie down. And tell us, what is better than lying down in a soft clean place and putting your feet up? You shouldn't sit on your pack, but if you pull off your shoes and rest your feet up there, there is no harm.
You set the pack down all over the place, already. A little extra time on the ground will not hurt it. Put your feet up. In a respectful way.
Or stuff the pack under your knees. Propping up your feet can put too much stress on knees, sometimes, but stuffing a pillow under the knees also raises the legs but prevents that sort of backward-bending knee stress. Try it. Bing. Another multiple use.
Now add another trick to your list. Do the same thing at night.
Stuff some spare clothing under your head and use the pack beneath your knees at night. Let the blood flow back out of your ankles and toes and up north where it belongs, close you your heart. By morning your feet will be refreshed, your legs will be taught and humming again, and not puffed up by pools of nasty stagnant unhappy blood.
Bing. Another multiple use, which is as insulation.
Even an empty pack, or one with a spare shirt or two, can keep your legs and feet off the ground. If you sleep in a hammock, same story. Sleeping pads are not so much for comfort as for insulation. Short pads are lighter than long ones. That leaves your legs hanging out there somewhere, and they need help too, but not as much as the section between your tailbone and your headbone, so an empty pack works. It keeps your feet and legs just a tad bit off the ground. Breaks that contact. Provides an air space. Insulates. Try it.
– Weird but possibly only semi wonderful. –
If you work hard enough at it you can find all sorts of uses for a pack. If necessity is the mother of invention, then playing in Death's Back Yard can be the mother of necessity.
There are days you get in trouble, and your pack can help you get back out.
Say that somehow your shelter wanders off, leaving you there all alone. Say that your bedding went with it. We're not saying that they had anything going on, or had a problem with you or anything. Just say you don't have either of them anymore, for whatever reason. And say that night begins settling down on the world. Whatcha gonna do there? Die?
Nope.
Use your pack. Sit down, tune in, snooze out.
Get dressed. Put on all your clothes, find the coziest, warmest, most protected spot, and sit there. Prop yourself up. Pull your pack on over your legs, like an upside down skirt. Pull your arms inside your clothing if you can, pulling the empty sleeves inside too, over your chest, and sleep as well as you can. Get up and exercise for a few minutes every time you get too cold.
No.
This won't be fun.
But you'll be able to add another check mark to your multiple use list, as well as remaining alive. This also works as emergency rain or wind protection if you're not spending the night but need a bit of help during an unpleasant daytime stop.
Plan B (there's always room for Plan B!) is to use the pack to go out and collect scraps of wood to build up a little shelter, or to ferry ferns or dried leaves or grass back to a bivouac camp and pile them into a one-night nest. What could be a better carrier than your pack?
Or, if you stop and hunch down somewhere, temporarily, and you need some cover from wind and rain just long enough to munch a snack, pull the pack over your head. Why not? This won't work on a backpacking trip when the pack is full, but on day hikes it won't be full. You'll lose most body heat from your arms, abdomen, and small of your back, and your head, and a pack, even a day pack, will cover these, like a tiny bothy bag. 1
Keep it in mind.
– What's next? –
Surprise us.
– Footsie Notes –
1: Bothy bag: http://bit.ly/1qs3yLL