Lexicon

Lexicon

Some words to make you wise.

Or to make you feel a little more smarterer.

Adjustable Suspension:
    (1) To accommodate a variety of torso lengths and thicknesses, and variable densities of back hair, some packs have shoulder straps and/or hip belts that move up and down on the pack frame, and this adjustability allows you to fine-tune the fit of your pack. Instead of doing this you could also gain or lose weight, or wait to grow an inch or two, or wait somewhat longer for old age in hopes of shrinking to fit. You can also go to a pet groomer and have your back hair clipped a bit. But some packs do not have external frames. In fact most packs do not have external frames any more, so generally speaking you should stop trying to adjust it. (Because it can't be adjusted — that's why.) So if your new pack is too small, then give it 20 or 30 years, grow old and wither, and maybe then you can finally fit into it. There may be no other way. If that is the option you choose, the be sure to get a walker with lug soles.
    (2) A belt. Adjust it too loosely and your pants drop down around your ankles. This can result in a nasty fall, so keep a close eye on your belt at all times. But this too can result in a nasty fall because you aren't watching the trail, so keep a watch on the trail at all times. But don't forget about your belt. If necessary, hire someone to come along and watch your belt for you, or stay at home and eat chips, drink beer, and let all your watching be of football on TV. Adjust the belt too tightly and your lunch can come back at you, with an attitude, so watch the belt carefully, even when you are at home and deeply committed to the NFL. But try loosening your belt if you have problems with your lunch escaping. But if your pants fall down a lot you have made the belt too loose again, or you have lost a lot of weight because of your not being able to keep lunch around long enough for it to do any good. This is a tough case. Try starting over from scratch, staying in your jammies for a few weeks. Then cautiously move back into elastic-waisted pants, and only later, once you're sure that you are fully desensitized, back into belted pants. If none of this works then suspenders or even overalls may be for you. Overalls are comfy, and they make it so easy to scratch anywhere you want to, anytime. Even in public after a bit of practice.

Adjustable-Length Shoulder Straps:
    (1) Ape-hangers. A useful feature of classical (insanely heavy) backpacks that permit the readjustment of fit after the weight of the pack has deformed your body and stretched your arms and shoulders beyond the point where they can rebound into a human form again.
    (2) Straps that attach to the backpack and in turn go over the shoulder, holding the pack against the body, and adjustable to boot. Useful if you are freakishly tall or absurdly short and still expect to hike without being constantly in extreme pain. The distraction of fiddling with the adjustments on the straps will keep you from noticing how much you actually hurt, and will divert your attention from all the giggling and pointing tourists who keep poking at you and want to have their photos taken near you to show their genetically inferior friends and relatives back home.
    (3) Mythical pack appliances that allow you to adjust the pack's fit to your own individual physique. Or would if they really existed.

Age Marks: Worn footwear, ratty shirts, pants with the knees out. Sweaty, stained packs. With motorcyclists, the stigmata of joy are bugs in the teeth. Backpackers are less keyed up, lower-maintenance people who move more slowly, and accumulate telltale signs only little by little. Status is a 10 year old hat, or a hickory hiking staff inherited from a grandparent. Or any used equipment over a year old. It doesn't take much — you just have to show that you get out there and do stuff and then you're cool.

Alpha: The dominant hiking animal in a team. The first to drink, the first to eat at a kill, and the most likely to tell stupid stories about its own hiking prowess. This position is not hereditary (most hikes don't last that long anyway), and it is not democratic. The alpha position is usually assumed by the largest, loudest, and least intelligent individual. Since this rank entails the constant risk of challenge by wannabe alphas, and alphas often charge headlong into dangerous situations, there is plenty of turnover. The quieter, less aggressive and more intelligent members of the group hold back, deferring to succeeding alphas until all these louts either exterminate each other or one by one mysteriously disappear over convenient cliffs, and then the remaining members of the group gently coalesce into a harmonious, amicable cooperative to continue their trip in peace.

Altitude-Aspect Ratio Diagram: This type of graphic shows altitude at each point on a route. Elevation is normally exaggerated by two or three times to make the point clearer. This gives you an idea of where in the trip the high and low points occur, and how steep the changes are, and since the up-and-down parts are highly exaggerated, it makes you feel a lot better about having wasted your annual vacation walking around getting bitten by bugs while carrying a heavy, stinky bag on your back. It also helps you when you're lying to people about how hard it all was.

Aramid: The generic name for a high-strength, flame-resistant synthetic fabric used in firefighters' protective clothing. Nomex, a brand name for aramid fabric, is the term commonly used by firefighters. Handy if you frequently set your clothes on fire.

Attic Cd Player Pocket: A feature of some day packs once upon a time. Used for carrying CD and MP3 players up high, high above the rest of your load where they will be safe. CD and MP3 players are things you might need to get you through an average day but which you don't need for longer trips. If you miss your CD player on a trip lasting, say, somewhere between a week and all summer, then you can always carry a few rocks instead. And if you get really bored you can stop, sit down, and bang the rocks together for a while. That usually does it. What's a CD?

Back Padding:
    (1) Something you might get with an internal frame pack. It's a layer of synthetic foam padding that lies between your back and any hard, unyielding parts of the pack, especially segments of its frame. The point being that your soft, delicate flesh is protected by the padding.
    (2) Rear-facing obesity. Sloth being what it is, and appetite too, we humans accumulate wads of body fat at every opportunity. Hundreds of millennia have given the survivors of our species an almost infinite capacity to absorb excess calories and preserve them by napping away days at a time. This was the species' original form of starvation insurance. For long, ago, times were tough and food was scarce. Not to mention the shortage of warm and quiet places to enjoy a good long nap. Snug insulated houses, comfy padded reclining chairs and cable TV now ensure that each of us can turn into a waddler. When there is no more room on our front sides to store body fat it becomes back padding.

Back Panel:
    (1) The part of the pack that contacts the hiker's back. Some packs (not all) are built up from sheets of fabric, similar to the way you can make a cardboard box by taping together sheets of (what else?) cardboard. So the flat part against the hiker's back is the back panel. Packs built like this are more likely to be ultralight, frameless, and made by clever bearded gnomes working in small vegan cooperatives. The kind of people who also grow their own food and make their own clothes and entertainment as well. Lots of up to date, factory-finished Hy-Tekk™ packs, on the other hand (those possibly both designed and assembled by robots, as well as sold by them), if you look at them closely, don't seem to have anything at all you could call a panel. Anywhere. Instead what you see is a tortured geography of padding, or straps, buckles, clasps, tensioners, contoured areas, and inexplicable unidentified multidimensional regions whose purpose you will never know. This is material evidence of Progress, with a capital pee. But all this resides in the same general vicinity of where a back panel would be, so assume it is one, and leave it at that. Unless one day you hear something like the tinny voices from a cheap radio, and they're really emanating from your pack, talking in a strange, beep-like code, or you observe more black helicopters than usual, or you can't help but notice that too many cars are slowly following you down the street, or a whole lot of otherwise anonymous faceless people seem to be out in black turtleneck sweaters, everywhere you go, at any and all times. If any of these happens, then shuck off your pack, ask the first handy person to please watch it for a moment, and duck out the back way, disappear into the bush and run. Change your name, your style of clothes, move to a different part of the world or a different part of the universe, take up subsistence farming if you can't get by foraging for insects and grubs, and never try to call any of your former friends or relatives, or even send them the occasional Christmas card just to say "I miss you guys." Or instead consider it only another one of those harmless random psychotic moments that every normal person has every now and then, and go about your business. Forget about the voices and the helicopters and the cars and turtlenecks. Until they grab you. But by then it will be too late, won't it?
    (2) The part of your body that is attended to or manipulated by a physician, chiropractor, acupuncturist, or fung artist in a vain attempt to relieve aches, pains, creaks and groans from said back and make you feel young and whole again. Face it, you're getting old and your systems are failing. Even if you're only 18. There's no such thing as only 18 if you're a backpacker. The simple strain of thinking about hiking another 200 miles is enough to irritate your ligaments and put knobs on your vertebrae. Someone who sticks needles up your nose may succeed in inducing temporary relief but the periods of remission will grow ever shorter, and one day you will realize that a dull, throbbing pain in your back means that you feel normal, and luckily not worse than that, so you will buck yourself up with a wan smile and keep walking. Once the creaking, squealing noises in the joints of your back get too loud to tolerate you can get a pocket radio or music player, shove the earphones into your head and drown out the sounds. When this eventually results in a loss of hearing you'll be left with only the pain, and the silence. Enjoy it while you can.

Backpack:
    (1) To backpack is to leave an area once there, or to pack backwards. To go home again, to where it's safe and fun to be. To move in a forward direction is simply to pack. There is no forepacking, not even in a playful way. If anything, backpacking as a sport is even more popular than packing because of the unnaturally high expectations that people put on the idea of getting out there and getting away from it all and communing with nature, only to disappear under a thick, suffocating layer of nasty buzzing black flies as soon as they step into the forest. Once people see what it's really like they generally flee within minutes and never again leave the pavement. A few foolhardy souls refuse to admit that humans were never meant to live out of earshot of an electric can opener. These few persist in carrying heavy loads in large bags strapped to their torsos with the idea that if they suffer a lot right up front they will get over the hump somehow and things will get much better. But it is not so. Things only get worse, and then these people have to backpack like crazy to save their lives, scattering their goods every whichway as they run screaming from the woods back into the safe arms of the highway.
    (2) A large pouchy cloth device of medieval design used primarily in the fine art of infinitely regressing torture. The backpack looks innocent enough at first, to the untutored, like a big cuddly fabric bag with a pair of holders through which one inserts the arms to support it. The victim is assured that the more straps it has, and the more volume, the better it is to carry things in, and that more is always better. Once the backpack is loaded and the victim securely strapped in (a process that, unbelievably, most of them willingly perform upon themselves), there is no easy escape. Discomfort and fatigue begin to take hold almost immediately. The victim (or backpacker as they like to call themselves) always believes that tightening the straps and cinching 'er down will improve his condition, but without exception this always degrades his state and clouds his mind. Those surviving a first trip will nevertheless go out again, and will deliberately carry an even larger pack containing more goods, in an attempt to make the trip more comfortable. This pattern of thought indicates the debasement of intellect. It is the beginning of the infinite regression, like a helpless child walking down a hall of mirrors, reflected over and over again in endless frightening ranks. More, always more, the victim thinks. More is better. Better is more. Finally the backpacker's knees give out, or the sad soul succumbs to madness, and the backpack claims yet another victory.

Backpacker:
    (1) A person who hikes, stays overnight along a trail, and carries all needed equipment and supplies.
    (2) Irresponsible, antisocial, smelly and pigheaded individual who follows his own rules while grinning madly and/or talking loudly to himself. (Yes, they tend to be male.) Quote: "He came to town with one shirt and $20 and didn't change either one."

Backpacking: What you are doing on a backpack, i.e., leaving the outdoors to go home again where life makes sense and fewer critters try to eat you or suck out your juices.

Bag:
    (1) First the bad news: This is what you can be left holding. Now the good news: Even if they got away, maybe there's something worthwhile in the bag that you're holding.
    (2) To wuss out, either if you do it to someone else, or have it done to you. You wuss out, bag it, and become a bagger. You promised and didn't come through. You planned, committed, and failed to show. You are a poopy-head.
    (3) What does wuss stand for? Nothing good. Neither does bag. It is a void, a vacancy, an emptiness that has no value once it is empty, and this may be you, so stay at home and don't annoy anyone by promising to do things you never will.
    (4) A backpack. This definition is good. It is right, and true, foursquare, righteous, resolute, dependable. Unlike you, probably, because you are a bagger. Give up already. Remain a quiet nonentity. Go away.

bagger:
    (1) The person who stands at the end of the checkout at the supermarket halfway through your transcontinental backpacking trip and sneers at you while putting your things into a bag. Also called a bag boy. Someone who will never know the free joy of backpacking, or of going weeks without bathing, or of living with flies in his eyes.
    (2) The person you'd like to condemn to standing at the end of the checkout at the supermarket and putting stuff into bags, forever, because you had plans, had it all worked out, and that person either didn't show at all, or called you five minutes before your trip and bagged. Poser. Dweeb. Mousenuts.

Bar Tack:
    (1) Also known as "barton takel" (or "barton taekel"), a barn door catch, from the days when the opening at the front of men's trousers was made of wood and was closed with a tack hammer to keep out the drafts and keep in the barley worm. After a Bronze Age cache of sewing needles was discovered in a dung heap in Shrewsbury one Saturday afternoon in June, the locals quickly devised a game which consisted of using those needles to poke each other. Eventually it was discovered that needles, combined with thread, were handy to fasten pieces of fabric together. But only after fabric was reinvented, having been out of style since the Bronze Age, which may explain why those needles were chucked out in the first place. The next step of course was to place decorative reinforcing stitches around the edges of pants flies, and the rims of button holes. Only at this stage was needle poking demoted from a Fair-Day amusement for children, and a competitive sport for adults to the status of an accident, and was ultimately entirely discontinued out of boredom, shortly after the invention of beer as it happens, which would have quickly done in needle poking all by itself since drinking proved to be so much more fun than any activity previously known to humans. Europeans, anyway. So, given that pants were eventually made only of cloth and not of wood, and needed neither tacks nor tack hammers to seal them shut, and given that these humans were a tradition-bound lot, but increasingly sloppy in pronunciation, the thing known as barton takel eventually decayed into bar tack, and is now identified as a reinforcing stitch, which nobody cares about either.
    (2) If you don't believe that then you have no romance in your soul, but may swallow this next definition of bar tack, to wit, a sort of uber-strong stitching meant as reinforcement on high stress areas of garments, which is true enough, though backpackers see most bar tacking on their packs, where certain straps attach to other things, or where a strap loops through a buckle or other doodad and is sewn to itself with bar tacking. This works just fine, but can you imagine sitting in a tiny dark room all day, working by candle-light, endlessly sewing up things like this? Some of those who try it eventually go nuts, descending into a crazed frenzy of twitching, shouting, and jumping around, having their energies, pent up for too many years by a crabbed, hunched, nearsighted, mechanically cramped posture all too often erupt into raging insanity, sending the erstwhile faithful and placid stitcher into a delirium of hopping and leaping known as tack dancing. This is invariably fatal, and is one of the main reasons why sewing machines were invented. Give a sewing machine a little oil now and then, an occasional goodnight kiss, and it will never, ever go nuts on you.

Base Weight: Also known as base pack weight, this is the weight of your backpack and everything you bring home again. No, it does not include any cute rocks or animals you might pick up on the way. Those are extra. The idea is that the base weight is unvarying, so you don't count the things that vary, like food, fuel, water, and nose drops. You do count the pack, your shelter (if any), your bedding (if any), your spare clothing (etc.). Base pack weight varies from person to person. The super-duper-ultra-ultra-nano-lighter trims all stray threads off the pack and sands it down so that it's thin enough to see through, then uses it only to carry extra air. No clothes, no food, no first aid kit, nothing. You don't see many of these walking around. They tend to die off pretty quickly. See, the beauty of this definition, besides being really short, is that emphasis on coming home again. If you go out and die, then it doesn't count. Your score is zero. No bragging rights for you, so you have to go out and then come back alive, and then you get to brag and/or lie as much as you want, or until someone brains you for being an insufferable butthead, but you do have to come home alive. In time, and after enough beatings, you will calm down about this ultralight backpacking stuff and quit making so much noise, and let a few extra grams creep into your pack, and begin to enjoy life once more, and people will gradually think about tolerating you again, and eventually, unless you are very, very stupid you will mellow out and you will quit measuring your food with a tweezers, or going on search-and-destroy missions for pocket lint, and will maybe actually get pleasure from backpacking once again.

Belt Stabilizer Strap: Start with a backpack, which evolved from a dried goat stomach, a very simple device in hiking terms. First the goat stomach was tied to the wearer's body with a bit of twine and held only a few odds and ends. Then later on someone figured out how to sew, and made a better pack bag out of some leftover pieces of hide that no one had bothered to eat. Time went by, and then the strap was invented — still pretty simple and straightforward. Later still, a second strap was invented and paired up with the first one in a flash of inspiration. Then one day some really bright, up-and-coming young innovator saw that pair of straps lying around, then a pack, and without thinking too much, sewed them all together in one wad. Eventually someone else several generations later first tried untangling everything and carrying the pack by its straps, and found that though the straps were still as lovely and decorative as they had always been, they were also really good for carrying the pack with. However he had little use for twine from that day on, and left it, in turn, lying around where everyone else began tripping over it. One of the more curious members of the tribe tried smoking the twine as a way of getting rid of it, discovered that it was made of hemp, and invented a new meaning for tripping. Centuries later people ran out of snacks and decided that maybe they ought to cut back on the twine attenuation efforts and get something done for a change, so they suddenly invented the frame pack, and then the hip belt shortly after that. This unexpected burst of creativity felt so good that everyone everywhere began putting straps and pockets and belts and zippers and doodads on all sorts of packs, then making the packs bigger and bigger so they had more surface area to sew on merit badges, coffee pot holders, buggy whips and pencil pockets. With that the pack was nearly complete. The only possible addition to bring the backpack to utter perfection was one last pair of additional straps. Everyone was sure of that. These straps were the belt stabilizer straps. The very pinnacle of ingenuity. So obvious once invented, but yet so very clever. These straps were mounted on the pack's hip belt, in a lateral orientation, and compressed said belt to aid in load stabilization. The tension of these straps allows precise control of the belt's vertical float and thus also of the pack's vertical float, in cases where ultimate stability is mandatory. The only drawback to these straps is that they are so terribly advanced in a technological way that a slight over-tensioning of them can unfortunately cause a tear in the fabric of the fabled space-time continuum, rendering it non-continuous. This violation of continuity can then knock the wearer straight into a nasty wormhole that in turn may poop him out somewhere around, say, the 1500th century B.C. There the unsuspecting locals will observe a huge, awe-inspiring and brightly colored backpack bristling with technical machineries and doodads emerging out of thin air. They of course will not understand this. But they will understand that the small man-like squirming thing attached to it is obviously a demon, and then in a fit of self-protective fury they will promptly reduce it to a pile of soft, wet, well-pounded meat. This will also ruin a perfectly lovely backpack. So maybe the dried goat stomach wasn't such a bad place to let progress rest.

Bigdoggin: The belief that your gear needs to be ever heavier or sturdier. In cooking pots for example, titanium is better than aluminum, steel is better than titanium, and cast iron is better than steel. In packs, a 10-pounder (5 kg, empty) is better than anything lighter. Example: Ed is out bigdoggn again. He's got a plywood pack held together by galvanized steel bolts.

Bucket:
    (1) Cereal bowl, cooking pot, coffee pot, bathtub, laundry tub, rain hat, toilet. Container for beer. (If you get lucky and find some beer wandering around, but if so, get to the container before it serves as a toilet. If you are the fussy type.)
    (2) A backpacker's tummy, where food goes to feel wanted. (3) A generic term that is the root for a family of meanings related to trails, trail maintenance, and fire stuff, such as:
    (a) A backpack bucket, which is worn on the back. Usually for carrying liquids, it can be used to spray fire retardant or insecticide, and is powered by a hand pump. It might also be called a bladder bag (nice term there). I wonder if anyone has ever tried using one of these for beer.
    (b) A Bambi bucket, which hangs from a cable under a helicopter, is collapsible, and is used to carry water or fire retardant. But these never carry beer, apparently. Its name may come from its utility in putting out fires and saving resident Bambis from getting a good toasting.
    (c) Bucket drops are not chocolate and are not used in cookies. A bucket drop is the dumping of fire retardant or water from a specially designed bucket carried by a helicopter. We have no clue if this specially designed bucket is a Bambi bucket or something else, but it would be a criminal way to waste beer, if it was ever used to carry beer around, but as everyone knows, the best way to do that is by use of a stomach, which is why stomachs evolved in the first place.

Bungee Cord:
    (1) A too-thin, too-flexible line used to connect animals in a pack train. Generally these animals (horses or mules) are not tied together but simply follow one other down the trail. Sometimes though they need to be linked, especially if some of them are skittish and likely to bolt. Wayward horses can delay an entire train until teamsters round them up and repack spilled loads. But if the animals are tied together there are also problems caused by using ropes that are too light and flexible (spongy). In this case if a horse up front lunges ahead while one behind hesitates, the line between the two of them stretches. A line that is strong enough to hold them but way too springy will send the horses bouncing around and banging into each other like a gang of tennis balls connected by a rubber band. This causes a wavelike chain reaction that telegraphs out to the ends of the pack train and back several times, involving all the animals. They bounce around over and over again until the everything is chaos and all freight is on the ground. Inadequate ropes were originally (agnrily) called bung hole spongy, and later just bungy. Eventually this was corrupted even more until we got bungee cord.
    (2) An elastic cord. Its core is a bundle of elastic strands. Around this is a sheath of flexible, nonelastic but protective fabric woven in such a way that it can alternately lengthen and shorten to keep up with the elastic center. Bungee cords are now used anywhere that a durable, handy elastic cord is needed. Originally though these were narrow, decorative, and nonelastic sashes used to tie sacred stuffed bunnies (or bunny slippers, both known respectfully as bunni-ji) to packs carried by East India Company staff while traveling on business. Of course we humans can't leave any word unmolested, so the name of the sacred and reassuring bunny figure itself (and the slippers too) came in time to apply only to the cord, and the spelling Anglicized from the original bunni-ji to the modern bungee. If you are taking your bunny slippers backpacking though, it is generally a better idea to carry them inside your pack where they will be safe and will stay clean and dry. And this cautionary practice also prevents rude jokes made at your expense by uncouth and ignorant companions. (3) Any cord that has become soiled by passing through your or another's digestive tract. This is rare, but it has been known to happen. No matter how clean it is going in, the cord, on exiting, will definitely be bungee.

C7 Vertebra: This is in your neck. This is important. You need it. C7 means that it's the seventh (last) cervical (neck) vertebra. Anatomists like to number similar things, which is why C7 is C7 and not Louise. The vertebrae in your neck are like all the rest of them in your whole spinal column. They help keep your various parts together and allow you to stand up on your hind legs with your head held smartly in line as all other self-respecting tailless apes do. And these vertebrae provide a nice home for your spinal cord while giving various body muscles nice places to attach themselves. Two things about C7 are especially important. The first is that it works with the other vertebrae in your neck to keep your head attached, of course, and the other is that the knobby protrusion at its back (the dorsal process, where muscles grab hold) is handy for measuring what size pack you need. Measure from there down to the top of your pelvis and compare to your manufacturer's chart. Note: C7 is not the same as C4, which is a plastic explosive and not part of your body, and should not be taken internally.

Canted Hip Belt:
    (1) A hip belt on a big fancy pack. A hip belt with attitude and its own slant on things. A hip belt that's street wise and savvy to the ways of supporting a heavy load, though not necessarily having a high school diploma. May be well-contoured but stiff. A hip belt like this has to be, because it's carrying all the weight of a heavy pack. No wait — you are. The belt is the mechanism that transfers all the weight of a big heavy pack onto your very own soft tender hips. The hips that belong to you, the ones made of living tissue. It's true that a canted hip belt, being angled, conforms better to your body and therefore hurts less, but you have to keep in mind that less is only less, which isn't the same as not at all. If your pack has a canted hip belt then it's probably very well made, having been designed by engineers who intended it to be adjustable to fit a wide variety of body types. Like you when you were slim, or now, after you've gained some weight, and also your next door neighbor, who isn't anything like you (at least you hope not), but whom the belt still has to fit, as well as it fits you, which may not be exactly perfectly. A canted hip belt may flex and move with you like a good dance partner, sweeping across the landscape, keeping time with your every twist and turn, hip and hop, swivel and sway. But the hip belt is still the point where your fragile body connects to a heavy pack, and canted or not, there's no incantation that can take the weight away.
    (2) A hip belt on a pack that you just can't face carrying any more. This is usually because your pack is too heavy, or doesn't taste good now, and you canted face it any longer. Try thinking of good and tasty things like powdered sugar. Imagine what life would be like if you had a candied hip belt, or even an entire pack made of ice cream. Think about Christmas, the fairies, the sugar plums. Try to imagine what a sugar plum might be and what you would do with it in private, if only you had one, and time enough to bend it to your will, and enough privacy so you would not ever, ever have to explain anything you thought of doing, and then did. But why stop there? Think about what life would be like if you had a genuine pair of Sparkle Dots Ballet Slippers from the Sugar Plum Princess Boutique. Or a set of fairy wings? Or a tiara and matching kite? Then there's the Jingle Bells Pastel Tutu that you could wear comfortably in bear country, on even the hottest day. Heck, you could spring for a Wholesale Fairy Princess Party Units Business Start Up Kit and get off the damn trail and out from under that horrible old smelly painful pack and spend all day, every day doing fun and gentle girly things like you used to do when you were young and played dress-up with your Mommy. There are worse things, maybe. Like the one on your back. Have a nice day. If possible.

Carabiner:
    (1) Resident of one of the warm and pleasant isles of the Carabinerian Sea, a place so close yet so far. Despite the warm climate, the abundant food, and the easy living, the natives of this region were both industrious and belligerent, having early on invented the weapon the Europeans later called the carbine. The original model was made of coconut husks and crab shells, with a bit of coral and a few feathers stuck on for decoration but could raise a healthy lump after contact with the noggin, if swung hard enough. Following the invention of gunpowder, metallurgy, machine tools, mass production, and bullets, these so-called carbines became potent weapons after a bit of redesign. First to go were the coral doodads, then the crab shells, and later evolution dropped even the coconuts. Now the carbine is almost indistinguishable from any other rifle, except for the occasional blue parrot feather. The only remaining link with the past is the clever, self-closing hook first employed in carrying these weapons, the thing we now call carabiner, which we use to hang car keys on these days.
    (2) An oblong aluminum oval formed into a clip, having a spring-loaded, self-locking gate on one side. First used as children's toy puzzles, then as key chains, later adapted by backpackers to hang useless crap from their packs, then finally modified and strengthened by mountain climbers to clip endless pounds of lightweight hardware to their bodies or to attach climbing ropes to anchors set in rock faces. In remembrance of their original purpose any climber who falls to his death while unzipping a line of anchors is said to have keychained it. Some superstitious climbers still hang a small symbolic key halfway up each climb as a good luck charm, or wear a small carabiner as a nose ring. The spring loaded gate allows quick removal for formal events and hot dates.

Carbon-14 Dating: What old backpackers do.

Cardiovascular:
    (1) Something that runners and couch potatoes worry about, and vaguely related somehow to the heart and circulatory system. Runners worry about it because they believe that an efficiently functioning cardiovascular system helps them to run farther, faster, and more efficiently, as if this was something an intelligent adult would want to do. Couch potatoes worry about cardiovascular things because they are afraid of dying before being able to finish the Great Couch Route, an immobile lifetime eating tour involving scarfing down a Hungry Guy Huge Meal of every salty greasy snack food known to history, despite the resulting intermittent blackouts and oily stains on the sofa.
    (2) A backpacking term memorializing Vascular da Gama, First Count of Vau De, and his hand-made pack the faithful wood and canvas Carro Dio Tipo 61 (Day Wagon Type 61, better known as the CarDio da Vascular), his 61 liter model of 1512, which was a fantastic coincidence since the liter wasn't invented until 1795, and then by the French. (The French!) This is amazing if for no other reason than that Vascular da Gama was Portuguese, and then as now the Portuguese and French are sworn mortal enemies and will immediately fight to the death if stuffed together into the same small box. Da Gama's search for meaning and a lifetime mileage greater than the circumference of the earth kept him on the move constantly and he became the first old scary-looking European dude to hike directly from Europe to India, where he later died at his beloved adopted home of Koochi on the Southern Koo Coast, on December 24, 1524, and was reborn a short time later to a wealthy family of sequin makers who named him Zamorin (a.k.a, Fritz). Later, in adulthood, he relocated and was known as Zamorin of Calicut (or Fritz of the Motley Sparkles), and became a renowned designer of capes. In fact, even to this day there stands a monument to him known as the Cross of Vascular da Gama at the Cape of Good Hope (now in South Africa), which was his masterpiece as a cape maker and sparkleteer. He is an inspiration not only to cape designers but to producers of home-made backpacking gear world wide as the inventor of the 61 liter pack. And a damn fine backpacker. And a man who really loved Koochi Koo too.

Carrion:
    (1) Dead stuff.
    (2) Lunch that you have waited too long to eat. If you have a sandwich, and it has feet and a tail hanging out, and it stinks, then it's carrion. Don't eat it. Give it to your little brother instead. If you squirt on enough ketchup he's likely to take care of it for you.
    (3) You, if you're not careful. Always carry the ten essentials, know how to use them, and practice safe sacks (proper pack stuffing). If you stink and you're still able to carry a tune then you are not technically carrion, only dirty. Go take a shower before someone brains you in self defense and turns you into carrion.

Carry Handle: A fancy way of saying haul loop. Go look it up.

Cell Phone/Pda Pouch: The future of backpacking, as seen by marketing consultants. If your pack has a pocket or pouch for a cell phone or personal digital assistant, a TV screen, a keyboard or a built in microwave oven, then you are on the cutting edge. You are also a butthead. Go away.

Clepsydra:
    (1) An early, all natural, non-mechanical version of The Long Now Foundation's 10,000 year clock. Also known as a waterfall. Functioning solely by gravity, and though dependent on the hydrological cycle and firm bedrock for smooth operation, it has to be the inspiration for the later, fabricated clepsydra, or water clock invented during the Bronze-Pounding Age when thumping rocks together was still considered pretty high (though waning) technology. Granted, you probably don't have enough time on the average day hike, or even thru-hike, to stand in front of even the largest and most vigorous waterfall to witness time on a geological scale, even with lots of boredom-fighting sun-sparkles and tiny rainbows going on. But you could. Stand still for several thousand eons and watch as the seemingly impervious stone at the lip of your chosen waterfall simply melts away from the water's friction, at the rate of approximately a millimeter per eternity. This gives you a whole new perspective on everything, though it will also make you late for supper, and, if you stay long enough, dead forever. Generally speaking then, not intended for personal use, and if you do try it, please remember to use it in moderation.
    (2) An ancient device that measured time by the flow of water through a small opening. As if that was interesting.
    (3) A cook pot with a hole in it. Time is measured by how long it takes your soup to trickle out and puddle in the dirt.
    (4) Whizz-time, or the standard length of one trailside urination, as performed in the upright position from a standing start. It begins with a full-on ache and ends when the final drops go down your leg. This unit of time is of course approximate but usually adequate for backpacking, considering how untidy, disorganized, and vague most hikers are anyway. And on top of that, there's really nothing to measure, not like you're on your way to a staff meeting, so it boils down to watching yourself pee on flowers and pebbles while pretending that you're getting something more edifying from the experience than an empty bladder and a stinky puddle. And some splashes on your feet. Face it, while you're on the trail you are really only concerned with time in three broad strokes, all of which can be measured crudely with no thought whatsoever just by looking up: sunrise, noon, and sundown. If the sun is coming up over the horizon, it's time to start hiking, whether you want to or not. When the sun is overhead and the flies are getting thick on your hide, you eat, and when you hear the horizon begin to sizzle as the sun melts down into it, you can forget about hiking for a few hours and lie awake listening for those telltale snuffling scratching noises out where you think you hung your food, unless your partner forgot again and left it on the ground, which, come to think of it, is where all the snuffling sounds are coming from.
    (5) An odd and rare sort of affectation rumored to strike a few female backpackers who then become inspired to pee standing up, sometimes without removing the backpack. If you ever come across this, please send photos. We're all curious to see how it can possibly work.

Clevis Pin:
    (1) The thing that keeps your clevis from falling off and getting lost.
    (2) Doodad retainer. Does that sound right? Anyone? Hello?
    (3) Sharp, pointy thing that you can use to pin down clevises (or is it clevii?) to keep them from scuttling away and hiding in the darkness underneath kitchen cabinets, where they might breed and create all sorts of havoc.
    (4) A device which has nothing at all to do with the Greek verb kleitoriazein which purportedly means to touch or titillate lasciviously, to tickle, which we're not condoning here, not even a little bit every now and then, even in private, whether it's in an anatomical sense or not. In fact if possible we're going to stop thinking about it this very minute and move on to the next item, which is:
    (5) The most utterly boring of all. No, we don't mean Clovis, California, "a full service city delivering a safe community and quality way of life to its citizens." Far worse than that, if possible. But with more consistent spelling, in case that helps. In fact we mean a piece of metal, almost like a peg. A clevis pin is a stout pin that holds things together but which needs another pin going through it to make it work. An engineer came up with the idea on his day off, but other than that it works pretty well. As far as backpackers are concerned this baby is normally used to attach the pack bag to its matching external frame. Or maybe to link two parts of an adjustable frame to each other. So one of them doesn't go running off into the woods on its own, whooping and hollering with an irrational upwelling of joy at its sudden freedom. First you got your hole, which is mandatory. Then you got your pack bag or a strap or something with a grommet in it (your second hole). And then the two of them get lined up just so, and the clevis pin slips in through the grommet and the other hole both, right square through the middle there, and then your cotter pin (don't get me started on cotter pins now) goes through the far end of the clevis pin (which has a little hole through it) and keeps the clevis pin from pulling back out (in case it wants to take off and go running through the woods, whooping and so on). And there you are, all shipshape and secure. The frame and the pack bag are held together by the clevis pin, and that is locked in by the cotter pin. So all of you can go off running through the woods together and only together. And the way this is set up, the frame and the pack bag can each rotate a little, around the clevis pin, so you got some flex built in there, and everybody's happy. Until it starts to squeak with every step you take. And your hiking buddy finally goes nuts and murders you because of it.

Coast:
    (1) Slack. Slackiness. Take-it-easy time. Lash your pack onto someone else and let them carry it for a while to experience coasting. Velcro straps were invented so you could do just this very thing. Then you will have time to let your mind wander and admire how the sun falls on all the pretty leaves.
    (2) The dry side of an ocean, where your feet don't get wet anymore. Usually goes on for quite a way, but may be an uphill hike. Usually worth it.

Codpiece:
    (1) A leftover from a fish dinner. Rarely found near thru-hikers.
    (2) A codpiece is like a small fanny pack but worn the other way around. It has a supplemental role as soft armor, which is what the original (metal) codpiece was. Later it became a form of medieval male marketing as these things got bigger and more ornate (i.e., evolved into fashion statements). Dig this — there were actual codpieces once upon a time. Once upon a time men did have this other kind of pack. Not kneepacks or facepacks. Or trouser packs exactly, but there was a pack that went with pants. Such packs were in fact called codpieces, and they went on the front, down low, somewhere south of the belt line. They could have been used for ballast but were mostly decorative for most of their history. Lest they overbalance the wearer they were kept on the smallish side, relatively speaking. Normally they were well under the 80 liter mark that so many modern packs reach. Most often these codpieces were used to carry softer more delicate items that might be susceptible to cold breezes and the occasional stray nippy dog, but they were also pressed into service as coin and snuff holders. (This is documented in the history books, folks!) But mostly codpieces were fashion statements. The male kind of fashion statement. Guys. Go figure. Surprised yet? Didn't think so. Although it looks like codpieces enlarged as time went by (as car engines have been known to do each time the model year ticks over), they remained mainly decorative, though some later and larger specimens may have been handy for carrying weapons or snacks. This ranks the late codpiece as an early cousin of today's smallest fanny pack. But let's say you aren't especially interested in carrying a pen knife, a few coins, and a sandwich in a crotch purse, or in stepping into a doublet and tights for a fun day of intrigue at the royal court. Let's say you might want to go hiking, and stay out overnight, and not have people point at you and make disrespectful or even hurtful remarks. That's when you ditch the codpiece and grab the backpack. Having left the middle ages behind, we are now more utilitarian and tend to hike and sleep and watch TV a lot more than we go to war on horseback, get shot full of arrows, poked by swords, or burned at the stake for heresy. So these days the modern pack has really come into its own and superseded the peepee holder.

Composite: A type of material made from two or more things you wouldn't ordinarily think of putting together. Trees are cellulose held in a matrix of lignin, a goopy natural compound that glues cellulose fibers in place and adds rigidity. Bamboo, though really a grass, is similar. A bright idea in early engineering was to mix straw and mud to make bricks stronger. This worked but had disadvantages for backpacking, which wasn't even invented for several thousand years because it would have been so much too heavy like that. A later form of composite was sand and gravel mixed with portland cement, and you know where that got us. Right — skateboard parks. Fiberglass (glass fibers woven together and glued into mats with plastic resin) comes closer to being useful for backpacking, but it wasn't until carbon fiber fabrics got mixed with epoxy resins that we were able to buy really good fishing rods. Backpack frames have seen some of this but not too much so far. As prices come down, new composites are developed, and as designers get smarter we might get better pack frames. Meanwhile, clever use of new ideas in wood composites (plywood) might do as well, and be biodegradable too. Back to square one. Ah, life. It bites.

Compression Strap: This is a strap that you can honk down on to squeeze things together. It is found on packs, and on some of the fancier stuff sacks. It is especially good at compressing sleeping bags and other soft things like clothing. What they do (the compression straps) is to compact the load, which makes a smaller bundle, and also makes it more like one single, solid lump, so it's easier to keep in place, and if you do lose the thing you've compressed, you lose the whole thing in one smooth move, without any mess like dragging it along behind you for miles before it shreds. These compression straps are nylon webbing (or sometimes polyester webbing), and come in various lengths, and various colors. A spare compression strap is handy for lashing things to the outside of a pack, as a camera strap, a tourniquet, a tent tie-down, and for a bunch of other things, like emergency belts, which helps to keep your pants up when you get to town, where they expect you to keep your pants up, and where they assume that you also will have pants to keep up. Another nice aspect of compression straps is that you can't use them to push with. They are not pushy. They only give hugs. Nice tight hugs. Really tight hugs.

Cone: From the Latin conus, meaning a wedge, a peak, or basically anything pointy. If you sleep on the ground then a cone can be a pine cone, a fir cone, a spruce cone, a twig, a stone, a shard of bark, a piece of glass, a rusty nail, teeth of a dead animal, or almost anything that can keep you from getting the rest you need, no matter how thick your sleeping pad is. If you happen to sleep on unnoticed animal poo it will not keep you awake the first night because it is so soft, but you will find it the next day and just the thought of it will prevent you from sleeping for the next few nights, at least. You get extra points if you manage to pack up in the morning without realizing that it's there, and then get the stuff smeared all over the inside of your pack and everything you carry there. You get lifetime champion status points if you set your pack in some nice soft poo while making camp after sundown and then use your pack under your knees all night, and triple lifetime champion status bonus points if you do this while using a backpacking hammock, and manage to smear poo all over the inside of that, the outside of your sleeping bag, your clothes, all that, and of course have it all over your pack too. Guess who did that once?

Conifer: An evergreen tree such as a pine, spruce, hemlock or fir which has needle-like leaves and drops its seeds in little bundled packages called cones. These trees do this to discourage backpackers from camping near them and keeping them awake at night with loud snoring. If backpackers persist in camping near evergreen trees anyway, the trees will pay local animals to come by and do their business in the campsites so backpackers get poo all over their gear. Even that won't stop some backpackers. No doubt you've met some. The kind you have to whack with a stick to get them to shut up about why their pack is better than yours. Or their tent, or supper, or something. It's always something. Carry a stick. The trees have 'em for a reason.

Cord Lock: Colored plastic decorative thingy for forest fashionistas. Take a drawstring having two ends. Drawstrings having three or more ends (or only one end) are best left to experts and will be covered in the advanced course. OK. Run both ends of said drawstring through the cord lock. Put a couple of knots in each end of the drawstring (a.k.a. cord) so it can't pull back out of the cord lock on its own. Done. You have now locked the cord and the plastic thingy can't fall off any more. Since cord locks come in so many colors (alpine green, baby blue, black, brown, burgundy, camouflage, chocolate, dayglo yellow, dayglo blue, dayglo green, dayglo magenta, dayglo orange, dayglo red, gold, green, hot pink, jade, lavender, light gray, mushroom, mustard, navy blue, pink, plum, pumpkin, purple, racing green, red, rose, royal blue, silver, steel blue, teal, turquoise, white, yellow) you can decorate your gear any way you want by selecting your specific color signature. As a bonus the cord lock grips by spring pressure. Squeeze it and pull the drawstring through as far as you want, then release. The spring holds, the drawstring stays put, and your stuff sack remains closed. Can also used on clothing, sleeping bags, and ever so many things. Proper cord locking ensures that your cord locks never become lost and you remain as colorful as you imagine yourself to be but aren't.

Cordura: Latin for fuzzy meat, from the appearance of food, especially soft warm sausage, which has fallen to the floor and rolled some distance, and then has rested for a while. Its edibility depends on your degree of hunger, local sanitary customs, and the thickness and composition of the detritus on the floor. E.I. du Pont de Nemours and Company developed a new and appealing textured fabric but could find no name for it until the breakfast tray of R. W. Klepsch, a post-doctoral summer intern with a fondness for obscure Latin expletives was bumped by a coworker one morning. He saw his scrambled eggs and sausages leap overboard and mingle with the film of textile fibers, dust, and stray hairs on the floor of the cafeteria. "Agggh! Cordura! Et hirsute ova!" he shouted in response. ("Agggh! Fuzzy meat! And hairy eggs!") Not a pleasant experience for a hungry young man who had just spent his last 75 cents and was broke until payday. (This was in 1929.) But fuzzy and hairy they were, the meat and eggs. A marketing man in the back, mulling over names for the new fabric, heard only cordura over the clack and clatter of his colleagues poking, slicing at, and chomping their own breakfasts, and was struck by a flash of inspiration, but recovered quickly after receiving only minor burns, and decided to use the word anyway. Originally a rayon product, Cordura was applied instead to a heavy nylon after that fabric's invention in 1935. Cordura was and still is a family of heavy, tough, and abrasion-resistant fabrics suited for pack bottoms and other places subject to high wear. Like all nylons, Cordura is also water-repellent and rot resistant (inedible even to fungi). And is still fuzzy.

Crampon Patch:
    (1) An especially demanding stretch of trail which taxes not only the soul but muscles as well, inducing a hailstorm of midnight crampons.
    (2) A sew-on fabric badge awarded exclusively by the Association of Steely Sloggers (ASS), a group of gnarly hikers who seek out crampon patches on trails and defeat the pain by force of will. The crampon patches they then award themselves are worn on the rear of their pants so everyone can see the bright yellow ASS embroidered on them.

crampon:
    (1) If an ineffable state of being is one that cannot be expressed in words, then the crampon state of being is supremely effable, because it is the time when cramps attack. Lucky we are that our default is crampoff, allowing us to neatly sidestep eternities of pain in regular life. You know the pain, like during the night after a long day on the trail when you roll over in your sleeping bag and pull your knees up to your chest to get a little bit warmer, and then it's crampon time, and you, my friend, are suddenly in full effable mode.
    (2) Heavy metal toothy things that climbers and some early season backpackers wear on their feet to secure a better grip on snow and ice and to punish it for being slippery.

Cuben Fiber: A light non-woven fabric first used to make sails. The name is derived from the America Cube Carbon Fiber Hybrid sail fabric used on the America Cube boat in the 1992 America's Cup race. The news media shortened the name of this multi-layer membrane fabric containing a mix of reinforcing carbon and polymer filaments to cuben fiber. The basic material is Ultra High Molecular Weight Polyethylene (UHMWPE), which is also used in Spectra and Dyneema fabrics, but those are made differently. One retailer listed two versions of this fabric at 0.33 and 0.48 ounces per yard (9.4 and 13.6 grams, respectively, per square meter). These two variants sold for $25.95 and $27.95 per linear yard at the time, probably more now. The short version of this definition is that cuben fiber is a really light and really expensive fabric. Bill Fornshell made a 1.5 ounce (42.5 gram) pack and 7 ounce (198 gram) hammock out of this. He may even have survived the experience. In May of 2015 the huge Dutch company DSM Dyneema acquired Cubic Technologies, the original U.S. manufacturer and renamed the family Cuben Fiber products to "Dyneema Composite Fabrics".

Day Hiker: A hiker whose scope is limited to the hours between dawn and dusk. Most of these people started out in day camp and were permanently stunted by the experience. You can identify a day hiker because the person is normally wearing clean new clothes. A day hiker has no idea what dirt is or how to use it properly. Most day hikers are actually afraid of dirt, trees, shrubs, birds, squirrels, and basically anything that does or does not move by itself unless it is either made of asphalt, concrete, sheet metal, or plastic and has a neon sign over it, or batteries. Especially bears. Day hikers love bears. Bears scare the snot out of them. They love being told that stepping even one inch off the pavement will bring the bears to drool indecently onto their crinkly new Supplex cargo pants and Taslan parkas and then eat them. This might be true. Could be. Hey, some of these fears are based on real facts, and why not this one? Encourage day hikers to remain vigilant. Warn them about how even a dab of mud can start them down the old slippery slope. Talk about body odor and what sorts of unspeakable things will follow you around with evil intent if you have any. Use yourself as an example. Of what can happen to a person who ever stays out after dark, even once. Ask them for food and water. Ask if Dewey is still president. Grunt. Snort. Pick your nose. Demonstrate how to make a snot rocket. Show them your eye booger collection. That should do it. If not, then ask for money. Grin. Keep that demented gleam in your eye. Keep asking for money. If none of this puts them off, then you may have new recruits.

Day Pack:
    (1) A pack used for day hikes. It might be called a knapsack, a rucksack, a haversack, a packsack, or some other name that you care even less about knowing. The point is that day packs are mainly for those who live in the moment. Why bother spending hundreds of dollars on a pack that is bigger and heavier than you are when all you want to do is go out and chase sunbeams? This is why these packs are mostly kind of small, fairly cheap, and much lighter than full backpacks, maybe around 1000 cubic inches (16 L) in volume. Depending on how big your lunch is, of course.
    (2) A day pack is a pack that turns into a pumpkin when the sun goes down, meaning that you either have to get home before dark or have all the fixings to make pie. The principle behind this transformation is still not fully understood, but scientists are working very, very hard on a pack that turns into a tent at dusk, instead of dessert. Other, more practically-minded scientists are busy developing several different packs — one that turns into a case of beer, one that becomes a large bag of nachos, and yet one more that morphs into a cuddly, snuggly teddy bear for those afraid of being caught all alone and friendless after dark. These are usually people who are all alone and friendless during the day as well, which is mostly people who have never thought of serving beer and chips and just kicking back and being normal and enjoying life for once. No, all too many hikers and backpackers insist on driving miles and miles away from home so they can tromp endlessly on dirty trails that go up and down and around and around and end up nowhere, so almost by definition then, these are hopeless misfit loners. At least that's what Mom says.

Day Pack: Something useful you wear on your back that is smaller than a backpack but bigger than a purse. Some people use the term backpack for anything worn on the back that also has shoulder straps. They don't belong with us. A backpack is not a book bag or a fashion statement, though a day pack may be. Generally a day pack is convenient for carrying a sandwich or two and a bottle of water. Day packs vary in size, and may be big and sturdy enough to carry a change of clothing, camera gear, and all sorts of other things. The prime discriminator is not the pack's size or shape or color but what it is used for. If the pack is used while out for the day, and convenient, then it's a day pack. You may use the same pack for overnight trips but probably not. Packs for longer outings are uglier and more scary than day packs. They have more pockets and straps and buckles. They have more flaps and cinchers and whatnot. They're probably heavier and generally take some training to use properly. A day pack is to a backpack as a cute little wind-up city car is to a muddy jeep with a machine gun on the back.

Denier: A measurement of fuzz weight. Roughly a pennyweight, depending on the weight of your penny and the heft of your fuzz. First off, denier was the name of a French coin created by Charlemagne (the old French king dude guy) in the Early Middle Ages. People liked the idea so much that they stole it for other European money systems. Charlemagne though, he got his idea from the earlier Roman denarius, roughly a day's wages. In today's money it would buy about $20 dollars of stuff. Back in Roman times the basic unit of stuff was bread so the Roman denarius was about $20 dollars worth of bread. They were big eaters in the olden days. Charlemagne's idea inspired the Arab and Yugoslavian coins called dinars. Italians called theirs the denaro. The Spanish? Dinero. The Portuguese, dinheiro. Even the Republic of Macedonia has its denar. Ah, yes then, the British. The British were a little different. The British equivalent of the denier was the penny, though they used the letter d to represent it, as you might expect from them. It took 240 pennies to make one British pound, which used to be a lump of silver weighing a pound. Instead of carrying around big lumps the folk of the green isles learned to fashion each lump into 240 sterlings beginning about the year 775 (or possibly 774 1/2 — no one knows for sure any more). Sterlings, in case you were wondering, were silver coins based on those used by the Saxons, some early German refugees who had skipped across the Channel in search of greener pastures. Some of them later got bent through various accidents and wars and things and became angled, or Angles, which, due to interbreeding, is where we got the Angled Saxons, or the Anglo-Saxons of today. If one of these guys had to pay off a really big gambling debt he did it in pounds of sterlings. Since they were lazy just like us, they later shortened this to pounds sterling, and then to pounds. Now they've gone decimal and ruined it all. The original silver penny though, that was introduced by King Offa of Mercia in middle England way back when. He copied Charlemagne's denier and his coin also contained about 1.5 grams of silver, to make it worth something. This was a fair amount of fuzz for the day. So fuzz already, you may wonder. When are we getting back to fuzz? Well, Shetland cows are the cute furry ones, with the bangs and the bushy coats and all. Also from the British Isles. Intrepid knitters, during silver shortages, were able to make do by fashioning penny coins from cow fuzz, and getting them just good enough to use as currency. King Offa's wife Cynethryth may have kicked this off. Let's call her Cynthia. She was a wicked mad knitter, she. The weight of fuzz coins was about the same as the silver ones, which was handy, and after conversion of the world to the metric system (except for Liberia, Myanmar, and the United States), the pennyweight became standardized at one gram. OK for weight, but since fuzz no longer comes in wads, how much is that in yarn then? We use yarn now, you know. Well, that would be for your 9000 meter length (which rounds up to an even 5.59 miles) of yarn. So now one denier is no longer a coin but a number representing a piece of fiber (or thread, or yarn) 9000 meters long and weighing one gram. A U.S. nickel coin is about five grams. One slim yarn there, folks. Not tough enough for backpacks. Some fabrics used in backpacks are woven from 500 to 1000 denier yarns, which means they're pretty heavy, which they need to be. Stands to reason. Get your fabric heavy enough and it's even bullet proof, though everyday stuff is around maybe 50 to 100 denier. Thread count is another thing entirely. It's a measure of how coarse or fine a fabric is, measured by counting the number of threads contained in one square inch of fabric, regardless of each thread's weight. (Did you notice how we just fell right back off the metric system? Didja?) Fine quality bed sheets for example start at a thread count of 180 and go up to 250 or more. So if Romans measured stuff in units of bread, then how did the British measure value in their society? Well John Heywood, a 16th century poet once said "I shall geat a fart of a dead man as soone as a farthyng of him." A farthing was 1/4 penny, so that means a penny was worth four farts. Who was it said Roman civilization was degenerate? Yeeg, try the British.

Detachable Pocket:
    (1) What the bear took.
    (2) If not, then it could be a part of the pack bag that converts to a fanny pack or a day pack. If you have a pack like this you can leave the main pack at camp and carry a smaller pack (a part of the big pack) out on an excursion. If you're smart you'll have an ultralight pack instead, in which case you can carry the whole dang thing on a day hike and still save several pounds (untold kilogram thingies) of dead, useless weight.

Dirtbagging: By one definition, this is ultralight backpacking, or, possibly, any backpacking. Despite the name you are allowed to wash if you think that's fun. Most people other than non-backpackers who think about dirtbagging (not very many these days) define it as super duper ultra light backpacking. In other words those who think about doing without. Without a tent, without extra clothes. Maybe without a sleeping bag (or a bar of soap, or even a lightweight picture of a bar of soap with the margins neatly trimmed from it). And without (much) food. Sleeping in a pile of leaves next to a fire, for example, is one option. OK, really, this is getting scary, guys. Let's go to an alternate definition of dirtbagging which is stripping backpacking down to its essentials to make it more fun by using your wits instead of your wallet. Cool, but only if you're smart about it.

Ditty Bag:
    (1) A place to keep your spare dits.
    (2) A music carrier. For those times on the trail when a tune pops into your head, and you want to save it for later. Sing it into your ditty bag, pull the drawstring tight, and let the music out whenever you need it. A ditty bag is good only for one song at a time, and once per song (no replay). Mesh is not effective — the bag must be impervious to music. Warning: If you do carry one of these you may also be regarded as nuts.
    (3) A small bag to carry odds and ends in, like toiletries for example, or other small personal things. Like spare dits. It is especially handy for Morse code aficionados, who also carry a dahty bag as well. (Dah-dit, dah-dah-dit, dit dit, dah. Duh.)

Drawcord: A piece of string sewn inside a fabric tube. Pull the ends to get it tighter. Do the opposite to loosen. Tie a knot to hold it in place. Simple even for backpackers. Sometimes these are used to keep pants up, but get the knot too tight and it's hard to drop the old pants in a hurry, and sometimes you are in a hurry. (Oops!) Drawcords can also be used on stuff sacks, sleeping bags and so on, with similar results, except for the possible necessity of cleanup. That's why drawcords go really well with cord locks. (No knots!)

Drown:
    (1) What you do when you are trying to cross a stream so you can get to the other side and set up camp, but you don't. Instead you slip and fall and your pack drags you under and then you inhale water and die. Don't do this. If you do, then first, you'll wreck your whole hiking schedule. I mean that goes without saying, right, being dead and all? Then your body will drift downstream in the current until it snags on something and stays there for days, bloating up in the sun. This will give various unsavory things their chance to catch up with you and drop by for a spot of lunch, on their terms and your dime. And it gets worse from there. Even when you're dead you do not want to play host to any alligator amoebas, arachnid badgers, cow cod, frog grubs, moth mullets, scorpion tadpoles, turkey voles, thrush trout, ostrich perch, or duck eagles. And there are worse things out there. So much worse that they can't be listed here, but nevertheless they will find you and come to visit, and you will find out what they are, or or you would if you hadn't drowned and gotten dead, and if you hadn't you wouldn't find out either, not being dead after all, but instead you would simply have had your normal supper of slimy noodles and gone to bed. But then again, if that's what you have to eat to go backpacking maybe it's all right to drown every now and then and get out of eating that crap.
    (2) When it's raining, and you have a tent (a nice one with a bathtub floor) and you set it up and crawl in and get out of the rain and eat and get into clean, dry clothes and go to bed, and wake up three hours later to find that the bathtub floor of your tent is called that for a good reason, because it has filled up with water, then you know what those noodles you had for supper felt like, just before you slurped them down and belched, only they were in warm, silky, salted water with a lot of nice herbs and spices and your sleeping broth is cold and maybe smells bad because it's got a bunch of dirt in it, but you are still drowned. And then you wish it had been a flash flood that had come down so fast that it nailed you before you could awaken. Too bad, because this time you will live to see another day.
    (3) Or say it's raining again and you have switched to a tarp, with no floor in it, just a ground cloth to sleep on, so you can't wake up in a shallow, rectangular tub of unpedigreed frigid branch water of dubious provenance, because if any water gets under the tarp, or if you brought it in on your clothing or footwear, it will quietly soak into the ground and otherwise leave you alone. And of course that is when the flash flood hits, and you go under for the count.
    (4) To kill by submerging and suffocating in water or another liquid, preferably brandy, though beer will do in a pinch, especially if accompanied by pizza, and what you are killing is either hunger or thirst, or both, or the memory of the long hike you just finished. It all works.
    (5) To drench thoroughly or cover with or as if with a liquid. Which is what happens if you go hiking in the rain. This has the greatest potential for character building during the first hour of a two-week-long trip.

Dyneema:
    (1) A material invented in 1979 by the Dutch company DSM. It is made from ultra high molecular weight polyethylene. What? Ethylene is a simple organic chemical (C₂H₄). Polyethylene is a chain (a polymer) of these molecules. Dyneema is a super long polyethylene chain. Super super super long. Very tough. Dyneema is resistant to most chemicals, UV radiation, and micro-organisms. In other words, it's hard to kill. It doesn't absorb water or even easily get wet. Likewise it feels slippery. It's so slippery that it won't hold a knot. Since people generally don't like the feel, Dyneema isn't normally used in fabric. It is used in webbing, rope, and cordage, and in making a ripstop fabric called Dyneema Gridstop, something that is used in packs. In Gridstop the Dyneema reinforcing threads show up white since Dyneema, like Spectra (another miracle material), is impervious to dyeing. Dyneema and Spectra are two brand names for what is almost exactly the same thing.
    (2) Good old polyethylene, like the stuff clear plastic bags are made of, but tweaked. It is High Modulus Polyethylene or HMPE. A bit gnarly though — it is currently the strongest synthetic fiber in existence, at eight to 15 times the strength of steel (40 percent stronger than aramids, and having twice the cut resistance. Also known as Spectra, which is the same stuff but made by a different company, and also less strong somehow than Dyneema, at up to only 10 times the strength of steel. Dyneema, unlike steel, is light enough to float, while exhibiting a resistance to chemicals (like water) that is way beyond steel's as well. Rot, micro-critters, and ultra-violet light don't affect it. In packs it, like Kevlar and Spectra, is used mostly as a reinforcing fiber. Elsewhere in the fabric world it finds its way into climbing equipment, shoes and luggage. The High Modulus Polyethylenes have a lot of strength for little weight but they do melt at relatively low temperatures, somewhere between 145° F and 155° F (152° C). While they could be made into fabrics their chemical makeup is one of extremely long molecules (the high modulus part) of almost inert materials, which gives them a slippery feel that people don't like in clothes, for example. Although HMPE could make your underwear bullet proof.

Eau d'hiker: Hiker stink, from odious (hateful), which is close to odorous (poopy smell), but with an added hint of omigod!, and worse, all around. Odious is related to the Spanglish adios, derived from the Spanish a dios vos acomiendo, sometimes translated as I commend you to God, but also validly translated as May God chop you into little bits, you stinky person! Ultimately all this traces back to the French adieu, a dainty-sounding word also meaning I commend you to God, but with the muscular overtones of Because only God can give you proper punishment, you vile malodorous insect. Hiker stink is so potent and makes such an unmistakable impression that a company named Liquid ASSets Novelties, LLC. was formed to bottle it under the trade name of Liquid Ass. From a customer testimonial: "Liquid Ass is the most authentic smelling ass product I have found. It combines both a bona fide turd smell with the gaseous effects of a noxious fart bomb." And that pretty well describes eau d'hiker, too, and though developing your own unique smell on the trail is more authentic than buying it already bottled, it is more work.

Elastic: A major component in expandable pants, something every retired hiker needs a pair of. You may get fit and lean on the trail but back home over the winter your horizons narrow as your waistline expands. It gets worse with age, after you stop backpacking altogether and only sit and reminisce about the good old days when men were men, women were women, and all trails went uphill. Elastic is to your body what an invisible fence is to a dog. It helps keep things in place though it can't handle exactly every situation. It tries but it can't. It eventually reaches its limit and snaps or gets feeble with age, crinkles, then hangs loose and dies. That's when your pants fall down. But up to that point elastic is pretty handy. It's used in shock-corded tent poles, in various places on packs (like pockets), in some shoelaces. It keeps things together, which is generally a pretty darn good thing. The magic part is inside, as it usually is. Elastic contains a secret ingredient, the stretchy rubbery stuff that snaps when you let go. This is elastomer. Elastomers are fancy chemical substances that can stretch up to seven times their length and then relax again and return to a more normal shape, much like you do when the next hiking season rolls around. The original elastomer was natural rubber, painstakingly extracted from the Para rubber tree of South America, but today most elastomers are concocted from petrochemicals in factories, and the rubber trees are left to grow old in peace. Like you, these days, when you can't even get up off the couch anymore without a summons being waved at you.

Endangered Species:
    (1) Food that is not fun to eat, and the people who don't eat it, and get hungry, and die out. If your food is fun, it's because it has flavor. Flavor is good. If food is not fun it won't get et, but will get dumped behind a rock. And if you don't eat, you die, so listen up. Food that was fun once, but isn't fun any more, gets that way when its natural flavoring substances grow old and feeble, and join the undead, like the stuff creeping around the bottom of your pack. Spices help. And sometimes spices partly revive even moribund food. The original four spices were saffron, cloves, cinnamon, and nutmeg, but they are outmoded now. Luckily we have beer. Beer goes with anything and improves everything. Beer is especially great because it contains its own water, plus vitamins, minerals, and bubbles. And it comes in sealed containers and requires no intelligence to use — just keep opening additional, pre-measured beer units as needed, anytime, and you'll do fine. ** For example, here is a simple recipe for a life-saving beer soup: * Pour beer into a bowl. * Eat delicately with a spoon, or, if no one is looking, stick your head in and lap out of the bowl. ** And here's another, higher-calorie version: * Fry bacon. * Grate a slab of cheese. * Simmer vegetables with butter, salt, and any seasonings you have or can steal. * Crumble dark bread. * When the vegetables have quit struggling, add bread and beer and simmer a little more. * Dump bacon bits and grated cheese on it and eat. ** Simpler bacon-cheese-beer soup: * Buy more beer. * Toss stuff into a pot. (Vegetables and whatever, you know?) * Simmer. * While that's going on, sit in the shade and drink beer until you get really, really hungry. * Eat the soup. Notes: * If you can't stand up, you had too much beer. * If you can't find the soup, use a bigger pot next time, and paint it red. * If you feel fancy, throw bacon and cheese into the soup. * If this recipe is too hard, skip the soup and eat the bacon and cheese. Tastes better anyway. ** Going commando — strip it to the basics and let your stomach do all the work. Here's how: * Open a bag of chips. * Eat from the bag. * Drink beer. * Repeat until the chips are gone or you can't find the bag with both hands, or you are out of beer. The calories will take care of themselves.
    (2) Animals that can't compete, due to ineptness at marketing or reliance on primitive, outmoded technology like dialup internet. This also applies to some plants, usually the duller, plain green ones that no one really cares about anyway.

Endoskeleton: Doing an endo normally requires a front wheel, a back wheel, handlebars, and happens when y'all go ova the baahs cuz yu stoppt too fayst, but the basic movement is butt over brains, and you can do that afoot too, especially while headed downhill. One of the key ingredients for this maneuver is a skeleton of some kind, and among humans that means a skeleton inside the body. If you check out your hiking buddies and see that they all have hard shells on the outside, then maybe you're with the wrong group. (Big feelers are another giveaway.) The right kind of skeleton, the one we're talking about, is an endoskeleton. An endoskeleton is inside the body. First the endoskeleton, and then various kinds of baggy internal organs hanging from it, gurgling and pumping strange fluids around, and then some muscles and ligaments and tendons and things, and then a nice coat of skin on top of that to hide all the scary parts, and then you have a fairly normal human, though some have another layer called the pelt, especially common if they're hikers. In case you're wondering why we're built this way, it's because the human body evolved to carry backpacks. The calcified endoskeleton (bony part) is a nice frame and provides a path for transmitting loads through the body, and the muscles that wrap those bones, aside from moving the whole organism around, add some padding and flexibility to guard against sudden shocks. Sudden shocks have a way of snapping bones, which is inconvenient, and so muscles developed as not only a way to move the backpack from place to place, but also as a way to protect the skeleton at the same time. And if you think this is a pretty good idea, and are starting to feel smug about it, keep in mind that many packs have skeletons of their own. There are external frames and internal frames. External frames are really like human skeletons even though they are outside the pack, while internal frames are more like those flat oddly shaped bones that lurk deep inside cuttlefish and make them sort of rigid and spooky. (In addition to the W-shaped pupils, eight arms, and two tentacles covered with denticulated suckers.) Then there are frameless packs, which are no doubt addressed elsewhere. Just remember this one thing: If your companions have feelers and eyestalks, and more than half a dozen legs each, then don't worry about what kind of frame your pack has, because you have more important things to think about right now, OK?

Evaporative Heat Loss: This is the big, steaming one, and it works 24 hours a day. If you pay attention, and can feel it, you have the sensible kind of evaporative heat loss. Sounds reasonable, but that only means that you can tell that evaporation is going on, and you are losing heat. You can feel it. If you pay attention, and can't feel it, you have the insensible kind. Not nonsensical or crazy or anything, it only means that you can't sense it even if you try, but you're still losing heat. Case one: Say you're boiling a big pot of water, if you like to do things like that. Maybe you're cooking, which is more sensible. Say you're cooking a big pot of spaghetti, which takes huge amounts of boiling water. If you have ever done this, especially in a small kitchen, on a hot summer evening, then you know it's the pits. It's the pits because you get hot and sweaty and pitted out. Big drops of sweat form all over your face and run, dripping off your nose, off your chin, onto your T-shirt. The walls get damp. Maybe they even run too, or sag, if they're covered with cheap thin paneling. The whole room gets dank. You can hardly stand to be there. You experience this as getting hot and damp and feeling crappy. It feels like the whole place is heating up. It is. It's a kind of forced evaporative heat loss, and it feels like steam-heating the place the hard way, with live steam and not contained in radiators either. But from the pot's point of view, it's cooling. The pot is there, running in place like crazy, and overheating. It has to to something or it's going to melt and die. The flame or the glowing-red electric burner under the pot is supplying all the heat, but it's the same thing. It could just as well be you trudging up an insanely steep trail with an 800-pound pack, generating way too much of your own heat. That heat has to go somewhere. If it all stayed inside you it would cook your brain and your gizzard and all those other nasty, strange and slimy things inside you that you don't want to think about but which make you you and digest your food and keep your blood moving and tell you which lottery number to pick, even if it's never been the right one, but at least you remain conscious and alive, which you won't for long unless you get rid of that heat, and you do that by sweating. Sweating is a way of pumping your internal juices from deep inside to almost outside, where the heat can get picked up by the air and evaporated, which cools you. This sounds reasonable and it is, so it's sensible (or active) perspiration in two ways. First, it makes sense, and second, you can feel it cooling you as this perspiration evaporates. Whether it's your skin or a pot full of hot water, the boiling-off and the evaporation make you cooler. Generally this is a good thing. On a hot day, you like it. It feels especially good if you can rinse out your shirt and put it back on, and let that evaporate because it makes you cooler. But the skin is alive all the time, not just when you are stinky hot, and the skin keeps working even if you don't expect it to. The way your heart does. Your heart keeps pumping all the time, even when you lie still and don't do anything at all, and lie there and take about a hundred deep breaths and get all of your blood full of oxygen and really don't need it circulating because you already have enough to make you dizzy. But your heart doesn't stop for a minute or two. It keeps going, and so does your skin, whether you need to keep cool or not. That is what skin does, and mostly you can't feel it, especially if you are sitting still or are asleep, and this is insensible perspiration, and it also cools you, even if you don't need it to, and it also creates evaporative heat loss. You can feel this at night sometimes, without knowing it, because you will get too cool when you do not need to be cooled at all, and have a bad night. And there is a third thing here. Your clothing. Even if you are warm, and not really sweating enough to notice it, if your clothes are damp with sweat, or you got rained on, then you can still lose heat through evaporation because of your body heat trying to dry out your clothes, which takes heat energy from inside you and puts it into the water in your clothing, which then gets evaporated away, and that can make you cold too. If you are in this situation it will help to do one of these things: switch to dry clothing, or at least wring out the wet clothing you have on, so there is less water in it that your body has to evaporate away, or exercise and produce more body heat and feel warmer, or at least, if you have to wear the damp clothing just because you need something on, put some dry clothing next to your skin, and put the damp clothing on over the top of that. It will still dry, but it won't be sucking so much heat directly out of your body. Got it?

Exoskeleton:
    (1) Preferred outerwear of your ever-present, six-legged buddies. (Flies, mosquitoes, assorted crawling creepies.) It makes them waterproof (which is why peeing on them isn't an effective repellent), and harder to crush (but not that hard, especially if they've gotten you really, really mad).
    (2) Layers of dirt, dried sweat, and insect repellent that have built up over hours, days, or weeks. How thick and strong it is depend mostly on what you have to guard against, how serious a pig you are, and whether you really give a damn anyway. Can form a hardy, protective, bite-proof shell in case you stumble onto a really big and thoroughly ornery beast. The disgust factor alone may work in your favor. Go for it.

Expandable Main Compartment:
    (1) Digestive system. Inner tube. Gullet. Gut. Beer belly. Safety margin. Storage pouch. Survival advantage.
    (2) The inside of a backpack. As it gets bigger the rest of the universe has to get smaller. (It's a zero-sum game.)
    (3) Amount of slack designed into a sleeping bag to allow for farts. Otherwise it might explode, but how much slack to leave is always a crap shoot, as the saying goes.

Expedition Pack:
    (1) Nightmare on Trail Street.
    (2) The monster that ate Dad.
    (3) Trouble.
    (4) Marketing at its best. An expedition pack (or expedition-sized pack) is really mythical. It is only a phrase, a phrase meant to have no meaning other than the way it makes you feel, which is inadequate. See, if you want to go somewhere and have fun, there will be this salesperson who suddenly pops up in front of you and jabbers endlessly while blocking any progress until you break down and throw wads of money at him. Doing this is an admission of defeat, but by then you're so far gone that you can't tell any more. All you know is that you are hopelessly stupid and inadequate and want the best that money can buy, so you can get out there and have fun. Which is the whole point (feeling inadequate and throwing money, not having fun). Expedition packs are exactly this. They are the largest backpacks available, until something even bigger comes along, but we have to wait on that until the fundamental laws of physics get updated, because right now you can't make a bigger pack, not in this universe. Want to know what an expedition is? It's a multiple day hike. Or carrying lots of equipment. OK, sounds like work to us. Not like backpacking at all. Packs in this range begin at 60 liters and go up to Olympic swimming pool size. "Full-sized Expedition Backpacks can carry enough gear to keep you on the trail for weeks." What? Why do you need more gear for weeks than for two days? Ask the marketing department. They have your brain cells by the short hairs. Mount Elbrus is the highest mountain in Europe, at 5642 m or 18,510 feet. You'd think that climbing it would be an expedition, and that if you wanted to climb it you'd cut back to the bare bones, but here is a partial list of things that a climbing group took (in addition to everything you'd expect to have): Casual city clothing. Dress pants, shirts (long & short). Dress shoes. Levis or khakis. Hiking shorts. Swim suit. T-shirts. Tank top. Light sun hat with wide brim. Tennis shoes. Day pack. Duffel bag with lock. Buckled straps. Pillow. Towelletes. Towels. Lipstick. Baggage tags. ID. Credit & phone cards. Travelers checks. Cash. Camera, tripod, and film. Books. Tape recorder, notebook, pencil, and pen. Passport. Health certificate. Airline ticket. Immunization card. And all this in a 4500 cubic inch (74 l) capacity expedition pack? One thing you can say is that these guys were experts at stuffing it. But even they, with all that, used expedition packs well below the maximum size. Maybe it was the lipstick. Maybe guys who use lipstick, and take it mountain climbing know something that the rest of us don't. Possibly something that we shouldn't know, or don't want to hear about. Maybe. But on the other hand, think about the rest of it. Rationally. For backpacking you need a pack, some kind of shelter, insulation to sleep in, a few spare clothes, a water bottle, something to heat water in, and a hat. If you go on a multiple day hike you don't need multiple shelters or more sleeping bags, water bottles, or stoves, so what's the deal then? You only need more fuel and food. Period. And maybe a teddy bear, but that's the limit.

Extension Collar:
    (1) Extensible tubular cantilevered textile pack protuberance, used for overstuffing same.
    (2) Backpack foreskin.
    (3) Fudge roll. If you have a small ultralight pack but still want to stagger with the big boys, this is for you. It's an extra piece of fabric at the top of your pack (for top-loaders only) that normally serves as part of the lid, usually operated by drawstring (a pucker portal), but if you want or need to carry extra you can consider the extension collar to be part of the pack body, extend the collar, and just shove more in. Since it's a continuation of the pack body, there's nothing much to operate. You don't need to attach or detach it, or get certified before using it. It's there, and instead of cinching it down tight to seal off the top of the pack at its normal level of fullness, you simply put more into the pack and this extra fabric extends upward like the collar of a turtleneck sweater to swallow the surplus load. Having one is handy for those times when you need extra room in the pack, but having one also makes it harder to keep the pack closed at the top because there is this hole there, secured only by the drawstring. You may need an extra strap or two to get a tight closure, which adds complexity and weight, and so on, so in other words there is no free lunch.

External Frame Pack: This is to backpacking what having your skeleton outside your body would be to you. Think — what else besides a backpack has its bones outside? Hmmm...let's see...nothing! Right, nothing, unless you're in a horror movie. If your only other choice is a flaccid shapeless rucksack banging into your butt, and you're on smooth, level trails, and you are a classic 1970s style backpacker carrying north of 50 pounds (23 kg), well, no-brainer — get a pack that hangs from a frame instead of your shoulders. The only thing wrong with this arrangement is that it happens to work, and to work really well. Especially for carrying replacement heavy equipment parts. Or like that. For lightweight backpacking, not so much. The added heft of a welded metal frame is indistinguishable within the agony field of a screamer-weight pack whose strategically placed padding deceives your body into believing that you really can carry all that weight. Even as one by one your bones begin to fracture and telescope into themselves. Once upon a time this was state of the art and everybody lusted after it. Then they actually tried backpacking and gave up as soon as the stabbing pain of reality came to visit. The real problem is that while everything else has miniaturized over the decades, or been replaced by miracle synthetics, nothing is yet better than aluminum tubing. So dude, you're screwed.

extreme sport:
    (1) Dumb dangerous stuff done too fast, too high, too energetically, too recklessly, for too long, or all of the above. Football, for example. Any kind of football, not just the butt-stupid American stuff.
    (2) Fun, interesting, educational activities like Kitty Licking (washing a stray cat with your tongue), Death By Squirrel (lying down at the park and covering yourself in bread crumbs), Extreme Ironing (while skydiving, underwater, rock climbing...), Urban Housework (vacuuming the park, especially at night), Linthandling (hitting up strangers on the subway for navel spare lint), Droning (flying without a pilot), Backshelfing (eating the unidentifiable stuff at the back of the refrigerator), Extreme Croquet (played cross country, with water hazards and alligators).
    (3) Classical backpacking, with boots, a frame pack, and steel cookware.

Fall Line:
    (1) The route your pack follows when you get pooped, let it slide off you to the ground, and then watch it head off on its own toward some hidden black hole trying to suck it down for lunch. If you have a basketball with you, and drop it, it will follow the same route. Why you'd be carrying a basketball on a backpacking trip is a great question, but one that no sane person can find a reasonable answer for.
    (2) The most direct route downhill from any point. This is why building a trail along the fall line is so great. It immediately shows you the effects of soil erosion since water just loves to run along the fall line, and rips out great swaths of trail while doing it.
    (3) The suicide route for a downhill skier.
    (4) The line separating upland and coast. The former may be rocky, and the latter, goopy and flat, and the fall line can be dramatic. If a stream crosses it, you'll usually see at least a rapids, and maybe waterfalls. In the eastern U.S. the cities of Boston, MA, Pawtucket, RI, Troy, NY, Trenton, NJ, Washington, D.C., Fredericksburg, Richmond, and Petersburg, VA, Raleigh, NC, Columbia, SC, and Augusta, GA are all at the fall line, on the flat, goopy side where it's easy to build cities. On one side, civilization. On the other, dragons and mosquitoes.
    (5) A root that trips everyone in a line of hikers forms a fall line. It's like a chorus line, but smells worse and is composed wholly of the inept.

Fanny Pack:
    (1) A freight pack sized to fit a fanny (a shaggy but strong mule-like creature) and for hauling things too big for humans to carry. Its use is an exercise in frustration since fannies, though large, robust, and able to subsist on the skimpiest random tufts of dry grass, are beasts of burden exceedingly difficult to manage, preferring to squat down onto their haunches at every opportunity and remain immobile for hours if possible, only getting more and more belligerent if prodded to rise. The only sure-fire way to get a fanny moving is a swift kick in the butt, which is not an option once it is sitting on the thing, so you have to wait. But on the other hand this can be a good time to thoroughly pick your nose or dig wax out of your ears, or have a cup of something hot. It's also a damn good reason to carry a little whiskey.
    (2) Belt pack, belly bag, buffalo pouch, hip sack, hip pack, bum bag, man bag, man purse, reverse codpiece, asspack, nerd duffel. A zippered or velcroed belted fabric container worn on the waist and used to carry small items like lunch, a water bottle, tiny dead animals, drugs, or firearms. (Never tease a nerd. He may shoot you, dude.)
    (3) The inevitable result of too little roughage and fresh fruit in your diet.

Feng Shui:
    (1) The ancient art of flinging bullsnit at the wall, but with a fancy new name. In case you don't believe it then wallow in these quotes from the back cover of Feng Shui For Dummies: (a) "'If you've ever wanted to know anything about Feng Shui, this IS the book to read.'— Deborah Rachel Kagan, President, Sacred Interiors. (b) 'David Kennedy has certainly come up with a gem with Feng Shui for Dummies. I highly recommend this read.'- James Moser, CEO, Feng Shui Warehouse. (c) 'David has a unique way of organizing the incredible amounts of Feng Shui information into clear, concise, easy to understand principles...'- Ileen Nelson, Director of the Feng Shui Studies Department, The Metropolitan Institute of Interior Design." Available at all fine bookstores. (Look for the sign of the giant bull.)
    (2) The esoteric process of breaking down and folding up your backpacking stove and fitting it into a space smaller than the individual parts require. Also called trail shway or stove shway. Spellings vary. Similar to but distinct from Ray-Way.
    (3) Setting up your stove and cook set in such a way as to take the best advantage of the terrain, temperature, humidity, wind speed and direction, and other features such as natural wind breaks. In this application, it is frequently translated as cook shway or pot shway. But if pot shway too much, pot tip over, spilling noodles, and it ruin supper. Most unfortunate.

File Folder Pocket: A kind of pocket found on some specialized packs. Unlike most other pockets this one is rigid, making it good for carrying important documents in a way that keeps them safely separated from anything else in your pack. While the occasional standard backpack might have a map pocket made this way, anyone expecting to conduct real business on the trail will be carrying a FiloFlex pack. FiloFlex packs are identical to standard office filing cabinets except for the added shoulder straps and hip belt, which makes it almost trivially easy to carry them around. Prefer the traditional look of full-grain, solid oak? You got it. Or how about steel? FiloFlex has that covered too, in your choice of black, gray, or colorful bright gray finishes. And these babies are made to last. They can take whatever you throw at them, and serve as bulletproof cover for hikes you do during hunting season. All have locking drawers complete with built-in follower blocks and a contain a starter supply of manila folders, though an optional hanging folder attachment (with bear wire) is available for those carrying documents related to food. All models come in two, three, or four drawer configurations, in volumes from 4800 to 9600 cubic inches (79 to 157 L), and are waterproof, rodent-proof, and scratch resistant. Secretary not included.

Fire Ring:
    (1) A circular barrier used to contain a campfire. The primitive version uses rocks. The fancier version consists of an iron hoop. Not needed for small backpacking fires used for cooking.
    (2) Piece of bodily adornment worn on index finger of right hand by the Dark Lord. Has inscription in flaming Elvish characters and contains immense powers of evil. Also known as The One Ring. If you're the dude wearing this baby, you don't need to carry your own pack, not even once.
    (3) Seldom-heard crystalline bell-like sound that a finely-tuned fire makes while burning smokeless under a clear evening sky when everything is perfect and all is good with the world.

Frame: Something hard. Hard and rigid. There are those who build backpacks with frames, so that those packs do not buckle and collapse under the weight. If one of these packs succeeds in avoiding destruction by use of a frame, then the force of the weight of the pack and its contents are transmitted to your body through the frame. That is what the frame is for, a way for the pack to get rid of unpleasant, painful forces and give them to you. Hard and rigid structural elements can do this. They are either aluminum or some kind of plastic. An internal-frame pack has its frame discreetly hidden inside, while an external-frame pack leaves its frame outside, bare to the world where it can scare everyone. The internal-frame pack is much more in favor today since people like to pretend that if they can't see a frame it can't weigh them down. This works because people are inherently stupid, stupidity is a tradition, and people love traditions, especially stupid ones.

Front Panel:
    (1) The toothed access port behind which you keep your peepee. (If you're a guy. If you're the other kind, who can say what goes on in there?)
    (2) The flat side of a backpack that is opposite your back, and closed by a zipper designed to explode at the least opportune moment, via zipper fatigue. This can be bad but is really nothing compared to getting tooth marks on the head of your artesian friend while zipping up the front panel of your pants.
    (3) A convenience feature of modern backpacks meant to aid novices by indicating through zipper placement which side of the pack is wrong. In other words, the shoulder straps sometimes are not a strong enough hint, though the zipper on the opposite side somehow is, by showing which part of the pack should be held away from the body when the pack is in use. We think. And it's handy for providing quick and easy access to the pack's contents without you should have to pull all your stuff out the top just to get your fingernail clippers. Because when the zipper explodes it's all right there, laid out in a long line along the trail. For convenience and all. In other words, the side of the pack that explodes is the side opposite the side that goes against your back (which is called the back of the pack even though it goes down the trail ahead of the front, which brings up the rear). Clear?

Geotextile:
    (1) Dirt. What backpackers wear. Always fashionable. Wrinkle-proof, non-fading, never needs ironing. Washable too. Made from 100% recycled materials, and the main ingredient in potting soil, for those who wish to try growing their own backpacking food.
    (2) A special super-duper HyTek™ semi-impervious nonwoven petrochemical cloth-like substance used to provide a base for some trails. Roll it out, lay it down, pile stuff on it, and you just about got 'er did. Frequently used in turnpike building, in locations where good old rocks, gravel, and miscellaneous debris are no longer trendy as a substrate. But what do we know? Maybe, in time, all trails will be built from discarded soda bottles and shredded plastic bags, and will only connect shopping malls and fast-food stands.
    (3) The stuff the space-time continuum is woven from. Here on earth (home of Gaia, the gee-whiz goddess with long brown hair, sparkling eyes, and that welcoming smile), this subtle, all-pervasive, nearly ineffable universe-spanning stuff is basically dirt and twigs. Go outside and look around. You'll see. Squirrels dig in it. Foxes trot over it. Birds hammer it with their hard little peckers. We backpackers walk on it, and the lighter our packs the more fun it is and the less pissed at us Gaia is likely to get. Which is good, considering that she was the mother of the Titans, a band of brothers who piled mountains on top of each other for fun. So watch your manners. Think carefully the next time you feel like shooting a snot rocket at the ground.

Invisible Zipper:
    (1) A kind of zipper commonly used in skirts and dresses. Or, if you are a manly backpacker, you call yours a kilt. Even if you have a matching purse (also known as a backpack). And a cute blouse (also known as a shirt, though the little kitty cats and flowers on it may give you away, so carry some pepper spray in your purse).
    (2) The kind of zipper universally favored by naturists (participants in the movement for communal nudity) because it never catches on any of those oddly shaped, generally inessential, unruly, and yet devilishly sensitive bits of the body that go unprotected when you send your clothes on vacation without you.
    (3) A zipper that hides its teeth behind a flap of fabric, which in turn may be the same color as the fabric they are sewn into. The idea is that, except for the slider, which is the thing you pull on to make the fun zipping sound, it's all not invisible as such, but only hidden, the way a snake in the grass is hidden, or the fine print in your insurance policy is, so that, when you least expect it, well, it can do its thing, reach its full potential, soar with the eagles, and bite into your soft parts. All because you were lulled into a false sense of security, a secure but false senselessness, a senseless falsity that seemed secure. No matter. The teeth, they bite. And what do they bite? You my Love, they biteseses, with their little teethses, and makes you wail. Yes, Precious, they makes you wail and weep a bit, a bit of blood. Now is that nice?
    (4) Usually a coil zipper designed to blend into a garment so as to appear clever and stylish. See snake in the grass.

Knit Fabric: A textile made of loosely woven fibers. It originally was called nonits (no nits), nognats (no gnats), or knats (know gnats, which is what you had to do if you forgot your knittenwear). Now nipped down to knits, after a standard bit of linguistic decay that happens everywhere despite humanity's best efforts to stamp out the most entertaining aspects of verbal corruption and depravity. In olden times before window screens or bug netting this fabric was the first line of breathable defense against the buzzing hordes of suckers, pokers, stingers and biters that make backpacking the top-notch sport it is. Knits in those days were made of any stray fuzz that came to hand. Horsehair, dog whiskers, goat beards, cat fluff, and corn silk were all pressed into service with varying degrees of success until someone tried sheep scrapings and became not only pretty good at making knit goods but also immensely wealthy in a neolithic sort of way. (I.e., was able to buy a second spouse for use on rainy days.) Following the invention of shears it was no longer necessary to drag sheep behind horses to get the fur, and life became much less noisy until the invention of explosives (or the cat grinder — no one is exactly sure which produces the most noise, though the latter was quickly outlawed as unsportsmanlike). The prime qualities of knits are that they are soft, drape well, come in various thicknesses, are now usually made of durable, easily washed and rotproof synthetic materials, and they don't bark. However, no known fabric does bark, but still, why quibble over details? The real key item about knits is that the yarns going into them loop around thither and yon, interlocking with one another, and end up not only barkless but pretty cushy too.

Muling: Backpacking like in the days of yore, when it was closer to mortal combat. When carrying weight for its own sake was the point. When it was a badge of honor among manly men to leave the little woman at home for a couple of days, and go forth to the wilderness to sweat and stink, and possibly die with honor trying to drink the two cases of beer they hauled up the mountain. If you have stopped off-trail for a bite of lunch in the shade, and are sitting in peace admiring the cleverness of your pack, the lightness of your load, and the huge degree of comfort that shedding your own body weight in unnecessary tonnage has provided, and you hear distant huffing snorts that slowly grow nearer and more ominous, you may be in for a treat. You may see muling first-hand. Because of the excessive strain that grunt-hiking puts on the body, only the most slow-witted beasts engage in it. And they are vanishing. The few remnants of this tribe reproduce slowly, if at all. Frequently, even if surviving to adulthood (which is iffy), these individuals are incapable of the most basic comprehension of how to use a backpack, or for what. But once imprinted by an initial experience stumbling around groaning under crushing weight, they continue doing it until torn ligaments, destroyed muscles, or death put an end to them. What they specialize in is moving excessive loads under their own power. Which is muling.

Number 10 Zipper:
    (1) One heavy weight zipper. Used for 10-inch (25 cm) diameter openings, which is big enough for a housecat (or determined raccoon) to get through. Very few (possibly no) backpackers need a zipper of this size, or know how to use one safely. Originally based on sixteenth century British artillery regulations, zipper size was directly related to the size of the shot carried in ammunition bags. A number three zipper was used for four-pounders, a number five zipper was adequate for 18 pounders, and so on. These shot bags, ammunition bags, or ball sacks as they were popularly known, were quite a lot like modern bowling ball bags, except that they were canvas, held a dozen balls when full, required a crew of six to carry, were used under fire, and had no clever handles. Cannons, at the time this system was established, maxed out at a ball weight of 42 pounds (19 kg), and that was for a diameter of 6.68 inches (17 cm). The 10 inch ball (or shot), as you can imagine, remained purely hypothetical, as it would have been impractically large and heavy. Though impressive. Another way of saying it is that a 10-incher would have been something to write home about. Even to your mother. If you claim that you need a number 10 zipper, for anything, let alone backpacking, then you are blowing serious smoke from your muzzle.
    (2) A zipper whose width when zipped closed is 10 millimeters. Likewise for the number three zipper, number five zipper, and so on. This definition is no fun at all.

Oops Bag:
    (1) A plastic bag carried in case of unanticipated bowel excitement. A whoopie-whoop swell foop scoopy-scoop human-poop feedback loop. Use it, tie it, fling it. Also known as a flyaway toilet or helicopter toilet, this is a simple hobby that everyone can take up. Not biodegradable or anything, but a fun way to interact with people you dislike, as long as they're close enough to nail in the head and yet far enough away to give you a decent running start. Gastro Girl does it so you can too. ( http://bit.ly/1uPxJZU )
    (2) A bag kept in reserve for dealing with memory incontinence. Forget something, only to remember it at the last moment, after you're already packed? Just droop and drop: lean over and drop said thingy into your oops bag, then put off worrying. Once you reach the trailhead, then you can worry about how you're going to carry the damn bag. If you are really slow upstairs (no, don't write in to share your stories, please) you can lash the bag onto your pack and later hang the bag overnight with your food. Sort things out the next morning when you need to repack your pack for the first time. Some people live their whole lives this way.
    (3) Yo head, dude. The place where you keep a record of your dumbs, so you don't have to invent them again later. It's like, science 'n all.

Pack Weight: (See total pack weight.) This is a confusing and imprecise term which has been picked up by ultralight backpackers and turned into a religious debate and a weapon for scoring points against one another.

Pack:
    (1) To carry, as in "I'm gonna pack these here groceries out to the car now, Ma," which is the way true natives say things in Washington State.
    (2) The little gemlike world you carry behind you while you are engaged in ultralight backpacking.
    (3) The monstrous evil demon clinging to your back with six-inch claws while you are engaged in traditional backpacking.

Packbag:
    (1) If tootle-flutes and a drone pipe or two are attached, what you actually have is a bagpipe (or agony pouch), with shoulder straps.
    (2) For a long distance backpacker with an especially hearty appetite, this is a shoulder strap-equipped bean bag, which handily doubles as a camp chair. The advantage of a pack stuffed with actual beans instead of plastic pellets is that beans have more calories and hurt less on the way out. Plus they are biodegradable, as you may know from personal experience. And they make their own music, saving you the trouble of learning to play the bagpipe and having to dodge small arms fire from your former friends.
    (3) A lumbago lump.
    (4) Pack. Or anyway the thing that makes a pack a pack. It doesn't matter if you have an external frame pack, an internal frame pack, or a frameless pack, the bag's the thing. You can't do much with a frame all by itself, or just shoulder straps and a hip belt, and anyway the bag determines what the frame is internal or external to. You could have a pack bag made of anything really (like boards, or fiberglass, or welded titanium), but as you'd guess from the word bag, fabric is the real deal. You probably wouldn't be happy with any fabric substitute, no matter how shiny. With a correctly-sized and fitted pack bag you can carry as many cabbages or rutabagas as you need to see you through a trip, if any, or if you frequently fall into lakes and streams for example, you can augment your air supply with a windbag attachment (which, however, requires expert seam sealing). Then, just stick a couple chanters on it and presto, you have your very own agony pouch to play on those lonely nights in camp when you can't sleep because you no longer have any friends. (This is an example of what is called a vicious circle or rotating rat hole.)

Panel-Loader: A pack with a secret door. If you know where to look for it and don't forget how to operate it, you can get into your pack through it. Often literally, because panels tend to be a feature of large external-frame packs, most of which can easily accommodate the average compact car, let alone the average tailless backpacking ape. Getting into a pack for essentials like nuts, berries, bananas, and other snacks is important, so you have to be sure you remember how to do it. Luckily though, two things are in your favor. One is large, roaming, claw-laden mammals who have a knack for bypassing confusing systems of latches, buckles, straps, and so on, and will gladly rip your pack apart (sometimes for the simple pleasure of just doing it). The other thing in your favor is that a bunch of these panels close via zippers, a willful category of fastener that frequently operates according to its own whims, and which can cause your tightly stuffed pack to explode at just about any old time. The good news here is that you don't have to take a hungry bear hiking with you to get your pack open. The bad news is that zippers, besides being almost psychotically unreliable, have their own teeth and can bite every bit as well as famished mice, raccoons, bears, wood rats, and skunks in pursuit of calories. If you are a retrograde type, preferring the tried-and-true top loading pack, you don't have issues like these. You only require your pack to be vaguely vertical, whereupon you paw your way in from the top as you and your knuckle-dragging friends and relatives have been doing for millennia. It works. It's simple. It's cheap, and does not require all that many brain cells to master. So even you can do it.

Plastic-Molded Zipper:
    (1) The same kind of thing as a metal zipper but with softer teeth. Get caught in one of these and it's only a case of being accidentally gummed, and not being actually deliberately dismembered by something with real teeth, as happens with metal zippers.
    (2) A polyacetal resin miracle, in the case when it's not a polyethylene miracle. Either way, the teeth have their color built right in, and not painted on like metal zippers that are not either a naturally silvery or a naturally coppery shade. As if you cared, out there in the bush, when all you want is something to eat, a bath, and a place to lie down for a month or so in front of the TV. On the other hand, if you didn't want to get out there and hike around like crazy, and stink, and attract vermin, and get your hang-doodle caught a zipper twice a day (because you're crosseyed with fatigue), then why did you go? Be glad you have zippers and don't need to pin your clothes together with thorns like all the other animals.

Possibles Bag: A tool bag for dealing with your known unknowns. Known unknowns are the things you know you can come face to face with, but you have no real idea when they will strike. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week, maybe not for a while yet, but sometime. Sometime, for sure. Flies, mosquitoes, sunburn, bad water, headache, stove failure, cuts, slivers, getting lost, all that sort of thing, and hangnails. Mountain men of centuries past were there, coping. They couldn't fake a performance, or call for spare batteries to be helicoptered in. No, if a mountain man forgot to write down what happened during the day in his Hello Kitty diary, before dark, then he was screwed, and had to tough it out. Unless, that is, he remembered to bring his Hello Kitty Flashlight in his Hello Kitty Possibles Bag. Other things he might carry: a bullet mold, patches, an awl, an extra gun flint, spare knife, a dirty rag or two (for bandages), a tin cup, pipe and tobacco, and so on. Maybe a dab of bear grease to ward off sunburn, but not much more besides these, and of course, the basic Hello Kitty Essentials.* You, too, as an astute and experienced backcountry traveler, ought to have a possibles bag, and that is why, for a limited time only, we are offering a very special Hello Kitty Pack Buster Possibles Bag. Carry lunch in it. Carry cash. Carry drugs. The possibilities are endless, no pun intended! It's even big enough for a severed head, though that would be a stretch (also not legal in every jurisdiction), but size and legal limitations aside, well, there really is no limit! Bring your Power Ranger doll set to keep you company and ward off evil spirits. Bring enough garlic to chase away even the largest vampire. Tote along your industrial strength toenail and claw trimmers, or a hoof pruning kit (with polish in rainbow colors) if that's how you swing. We won't tell! Light weight, washable, and stain resistant. Order yours today! While supplies last! * Hello Kitty Essentials: Hello Kitty Colored Condoms Five Pak ( Merry Cherry, Snappy Apple, Cexxy Cinnamon, Bouncing Banana, Oyl d'Olive). Hello Kitty Mini Birthday Cake Candles. Hello Kitty Cup Set. Hello Kitty Mountain Man Plastic Chow Bowl. Hello Kitty Skinning Knife. Hello Kitty Rabbit Snare. Hello Kitty Leg Hold Trap Tuneup Kit. Hello Kitty Emergency Snake Killer. Hello Kitty Scented Thank You Notes. Hello Kitty Sparkly Tiara (special-order item).

Ray-Way:
    (1) The way Ray Jardine does things.
    (2) The one and only right way of doing anything.
    (3) My way or the highway.
    (4) All of the above. Ray Jardine and his wife Jenny revived lightweight backpacking and changed it from something that a few reclusive, unorganized lunatics did in secret to something that lots of bold, organized lunatics now do in public. The Jardines advocated (with extreme, almost religious vigor)
    (a) taking only the things needed,
    (b) making one item serve several purposes,
    (c) using lightweight footwear,
    (d) traveling fast by putting in long days at a moderate pace while carrying light packs,
    (e) stealth camping, and
    (f) sleeping under nearly weightless tarps while covered by bottomless sleeping bags called quilts. Since the 1980s and 1990s when the Jardines refined their season-long backpacking trip techniques, their redefinition of backpacking has revolutionized the sport and inspired many. Originally Ray-Way was a descriptive term applied to Ray Jardine's methods by others, but was later been adopted by Jardine himself.
    (5) The founding principle of Golite, a now-defunct manufacturer of lightweight backpacking gear. Golite attempted to incorporate Jardine's philosophy into its products but parted ways with Jardine (or vice versa, depending on who's right) in 2004, after Jardine posted a Golite Sucks diatribe on his web site. Heh.
    (6) Prickly.
    (7) Exceedingly prickly.
    (8) Insanely prickly.

Slackpacker:
    (1) A laid-back-packer, someone who has a casual attitude toward long-distance backpacking and who is also usually self-sufficient, sometimes carrying a relatively heavy pack just because he wants to have certain important things along, like books.
    (2) The same, kinda, but lazier. Someone who has his pack transported to the next campsite so he doesn't have to carry it. A backpacker who isn't really. A backpacker. May however carry a small day pack while someone else shuttles his backpack for him.
    (3) Someone who already ate all his food, whose pack is empty, and who has his head stuck into your pack, looking for anything tasty. A parasite, an obligate yogi. Someone who only wants to be your friend, while you want him only to be someone else's friend.

Spectra: Good old polyethylene, like the stuff clear, stretchy plastic bags are made of, but tweaked. It is High Modulus Polyethylene or HMPE. A bit gnarly though — it is currently the strongest synthetic fiber in existence, at eight to 10 times the strength of steel (40 percent stronger than aramids, and having twice the cut resistance. It is also known as Dyneema, which is the same stuff but made by a different company, and also stronger somehow than the brand name known as Spectra, at up to 15 times the strength of steel. Spectra, unlike steel, is light enough to float, while exhibiting a resistance to chemicals (like water) that is way beyond steel's as well. Rot, micro-critters, and ultra-violet light don't affect it. In packs it, like Kevlar and Dyneema, is used mostly as a reinforcing fiber. Elsewhere in the fabric world it finds its way into climbing equipment, shoes and luggage. The High Modulus Polyethylenes do have a lot of strength for little weight but they also do melt at ridiculously low temperatures, somewhere between 145° F and 155° F (152° C). While they could be made into fabrics, their chemical makeup is one of extremely long molecules (the high modulus part) of almost inert materials, which gives them a slippery feel that people don't like in clothes, for example. Although HMPE could make your underwear bullet proof. (If you noitced that this definition is the same as that for dyneema, and you're pissed, just mail in the coupon and get a 10-cent annoyance refund.)

Sternum Strap:
    Q: Sir! What is the correct use of the sternum strap, Sir?
    A: The sternum strap is not to be worn over the head or near the lower legs or buttocks. It is not a toy, nor an article of amusement and is to be treated with the respect due an important piece of technical equipment. The sternum strap is to be worn on, over, or in the vicinity of the sternum, which is in the chest or breast area, and is also called the breastbone. This applied originally only to males, but in later centuries was extended to women when proven that they, too, were human, had skeletons, and were capable of coping with technical hardware (in certain situations). The sternum strap is a strap, commonly of webbing, and it fastens across the chest (breast, breastbone, or skeletal sternum), the purpose being to link the two shoulder straps of a pack (knapsack, day pack, backpack, klettersack, summit pack), thereby allowing the tightening and/or loosening of this pack harness sub-assembly for general comfort purposes.
    Q: Sir! What is the correct position of the sternum strap, Sir?
    A: The correct position of the sternum strap when wearing a backpack (knapsack, day pack, backpack, klettersack, summit pack) is in the middle of the sternum (breastbone, chest bone, skeletal sternum, thumpy ridge) as defined within a vertical orientation. Positioning the sternum strap too low on the sternum (wishbone, breastbone, chestbone, or rib connector), may interfere with breathing (aspiration, inspiration, inflation, oxygenation). Positioning the sternum strap too high on the chest (breast, torso, thorax, pectus) can impede blood flow to the brain (thinkpot, dream center, hat warmer) by choking the throat (neck, airpipe, gizzard, gullet). Strive for a snug fit without putting excessive pressure on the chest (breast, torso, thorax, pectus, titular area) . It is important not to over tension the sternum strap to the point of full stressation, as this would prevent the sternum strap from operating effectively, and may make you dead (stinky, rigid, vacated, croaked, slabbed out, kaput).
    Q: Sir! What is the proper use of use the sternum strap, Sir?
    A: The proper use of use the sternum strap, in conjunction with the shoulder straps (arm straps, pack suspenders, foreleg cruppers), is to partially distribute backpack weight across the chest (tit-locker, breast, hutch, torso, thorax, highboy), preventing said shoulder straps from sidelong drift into the vicinity of the shoulder joints, or even to escape from the shoulder region entirely. Proper sternum strap tension pulls the pack (backpack, day pack, lunch bag, laundry carrier, warthog rack) closer to the body's center of gravity, improving balance, aiding in movement freedom, and facilitating armpit aeration. The sternum strap (fastener, tie, ligament, harness, yoke, band, thong, suspender) ensures greater backpack comfort under load (burden, encumbrance, heaviness, fardel). The sternum strap, to be used effectively should not interfere with close contact or correct positioning of the shoulder (support knob, meat ledge, pit shelf, arm hanger) straps.

Three-Layer Padded Iso Waistbelt: The manufacturer of this item uses the words comfort, core, EVA, firm, foam, plastifoam, reticulated, solid, and support to describe it, and the word ISO too. Sounds good. Add a little chocolate syrup and you have dessert. ISO stands for Imogene Salamanca Orff, the brilliant but quirky inventor of the waistbelt, which she originally meant to be an item of backpacking gear in its own right, with lots of shiny dangly things hanging from it. No one, however, could figure out what to do with a freestanding waistbelt, even one with lots of shiny dangly things attached to it, so Orff's overstock waistbelts were eventually sewn onto a bunch of goofy slow-selling packs designed by her identical twin brother Bruce. But they still didn't sell. The Orffs appealed to people but the waistbelts didn't, even with packs attached. Even with a free teddy bear included in every pack. Then, suddenly, backpacking was invented and everyone caught on. Finally the idea of waistbelts appealed to people, and they eventually figured out why it appealed to them, and then they began buying packs with waistbelts, three-layer and otherwise, but without the shiny dangly things. Unfortunately this was after the death of both Orffs during a tragic experimental muffin event, so they never made a cent from the idea, died impoverished, and were buried in a pet cemetery near Ferd, New Hampshire. (In case you go looking for them, the headstones say Fido and Joe.)

Total Pack Weight: (See pack, Pack Weight, Base Pack Weight, From Skin Out.) Pack weight has several elements. FSO: from skin out. W: worn, the weight of everything on or hanging from your body that is not in or on your pack. TPW: total pack weight. BPW: base pack weight, the weight of your pack and everything in it that will not get used up. C: consumable, everything that does get used up or that could get used during a trip (food, water, fuel, and so on). The formulas are: FSO = W + TPW, and TPW = BPW + C (Weight from skin out is everything you wear plus your total pack weight. Total pack weight is base pack weight plus consumables.) This is too confusing to think about, isn't it? Here's a better idea: Just reduce pack weight as much as possible but not any more than that. Be well, and remember — we're all in this together. (Except for those jerks over there who do things funny.)

Two-Layer Padded Shoulder Straps And/Or Waistbelt: Maybe some of this and some of that. The manufacturer couldn't decide. But definitely having two layers, and living in the padded corner of the universe. Shoulder straps are distinguished by going over the user's shoulders. Waist belts go around the user's waist. A manufacturer should be able to tell the difference between the two, but they probably know what they're doing, so go ahead and pay more for this. Backpackers are all rich, and you can afford it.

Waist Pack: (Hip pack, fanny pack, lumbar pack.) Larger than a wristwatch pack but usually smaller than a 44 DD bra (partly due to its single-cup configuration), the waist pack is otherwise completely boring, and is only another name for a pack that is fastened to your body by a strap around the waist. (What a waste of syllables.) Codpieces are much more fun but more difficult to conceal firearms in.

Warp Knit Fabric: This kind of fabric is produced by giant machines which do not care about humans, what humans think, where they go, or what they do in their spare time. However, the giant machines do a very good job of doing what they do, which is assembling fabric from yarns in a way that makes it look knitted (because it is, if you look closely) but also so it isn't really the same kind of thing you'd see when you think of knit fabric, because you're basically ignorant and this whole process has been worked out years and years ago, in private, without any regard for what you might think. Warp knit fabric is constructed like a chain link fence, but with yarns instead of wire. Basically it's all loops, and each loop links to its neighbors so the resulting fabric isn't poofy and fuzzy like the sweaters Aunt Alice used to knit for you but thin, limp, and often shiny. Your lingerie may be made from warp knit fabric. For example. And if you're reluctant to admit that you wear lingerie, you can say that the shiny, silky lining of your jacket is warp knit fabric, which it might be. If you ever hear the term tricot, then guess what? Yes, you are wearing warp knit fabric. And can, unlike with your lingerie, point to it in public and admit to the fact without blushing or getting pummeled.

YMMV:
    (1) Yum-vee. The faded red, dented, rattling 1956 Ford pickup truck whose driver unexpectedly finds you on a deserted anonymous gravel road 25 miles from the nearest town, where the trail just happens to cross it, for no particular reason, and takes you and your pack into town, and buys you all the food you can eat, a few beers, and lets you stay in his basement bedroom for the night, and then drives you all the way back to the trail the next day, just because he's always wanted to hike out there but never really knew where the trail went or what it was all about until you came along, and when he finally drops you off he hands you a whole, carefully wrapped, precisely-made apple pie that his wife baked overnight, for you.
    (2) Yo! Mama! Make veggies! The perennial cry of the thru-hiker walking off the trail famished for fresh foods like mashed potatoes and melons, carrot, cantaloupe, and cauliflower crepes, wafer-thin water cress, winter nellis pear, walnut, wheat, and wasabi waffles, french fried green tomatoes, figs, filberts, and fruit salad served on a bed of flaming hot Cheetos, or perhaps radish, raspberry, red grapefruit, relish, red bean, ricotta cheese, romaine lettuce, and rye bread sandwiches. More veggies, please! Of course during your hike your system has grown totally unaccustomed to real food, so you will, for a while, do a lot of running. How much? No one knows for sure. In other words, your mileage may vary.
    (3) Yawning Man of the Mountains of Vermont: A creepy but sleepy East Coast cousin of Sasquatch. Said to like nothing better than to sidle into a camp and slide into someone's sleeping bag while the campers are out exploring for the day. Usually leaves after a short nap, but telltale signs that you've been YMMV'd are a lingering smell of dog-monkey, long, stray, bright red hairs in your sleeping bag, and occasionally, feces left in the tent, usually inside or under the sleeping bag. Whenever you're out camping, lie there for a while and listen as night draws near. If you hear a yawning sound, that may be your companion in the next tent, but maybe not. And if, the next morning, your companion in the next tent isn't in the next tent but is missing, and you find long, stray, bright red hairs, and experience the lingering smell of dog-monkey, well, don't waste your time searching. Your friend will not be back. But on the bright side you have inherited some camping gear, and you can always use more of that. (Be sure to wash it thoroughly before use.) (http://bit.ly/1uKazD9 )

Yum Yum Bag:
    (1) Barf bag, in case you get motion sickness while hiking. This is probably a strong hint that hiking isn't for you. Better not even think about backpacking.
    (2) Bear bag. You score extra critter points if you sleep directly under it.
    (3) Garbage bag. For leftovers, anything that can't be eaten, or what no one wants to even think about eating, but that something non-human might eat (or fight you for). Especially useful for a gaggle of scouts who haven't learned the rule to eat all you cook and cook all you eat. Double points for using this bag of glop as punishment, making anyone who breaks the rules or is just too sleepy to get up on time carry and look after it, thus ruining for life another person's attitude toward the outdoors and spending time with others.
    (4) A bag for snacks, or a bag of snacks. But if you're a rat, it can be garbage bag. Who cares? Dinner scrapings are as good as anything else.
    (5) One of those plastic bags that you can roast critters in, and when used as a garbage bag, doubles as that critter's last resting place.

Zero-Mile Mark:
    (1) The official point at which a measured trail officially starts. This is another way of saying the spot where a trail begins, sort of. This point may or may not be the trailhead. Figuring out if the trail is measured from one end to the other, or from in the middle somewhere to some other point not the end, or how to get on the damn thing, or if it actually matters or not is your own damn problem. Some people like to play games. Some of us just like to hike.
    (2) Your hiking partner who always calls to bail right before the time you agreed to meet to start your hike. This is the kind of person who if he was doing a thru-hike, would do nothing but zero days. And would have a story prepared ahead of time for every single one of those days. He's got stories. Endless stories. All kinds of stories about where he's been, what he's done, who he knows, who knows him, all his connections to the rich and famous. All people you have heard of. Whom everyone has heard of. That's the point. But you've never heard any of them connected with backpacking, or even day hiking, or even walking around the block, but Zero-Mile Mark is a close personal friend of each and every one of them without exception, and is telling you this secret story about Famous Person X, who does not want it to get out that they do something as dirt-poor ordinary and sweaty and low-class as backpacking because it would ruin their image, and Zero-Mile Mark really shouldn't tell you, but finally gets you worn down so far you're almost ready to strangle yourself just for something to do other than listen to this guy go on and on, so he drops the name. Maybe one name, maybe a bunch of names. Britney Spears. Bill Gates. Michael Jackson. The Pope. All secret backpackers. All intimate friends of Zero-Mile Mark, but he can't really say more than that, and you have to keep it quiet, OK? He shouldn't have said anything. So he starts to talk about gear. His eight backpacks, and which one is best and which one isn't the best, and which one attracts more chicks, and which one is more gnarly-manly looking, and then he goes into waterproof-breathable jackets and tells you everything you didn't want to know about Expanded PTFE Membrane vs. EVENT Laminate vs. Entrant GII XT Laminate vs. Nextec vs. Membrain vs. Sympatex vs. Conduit vs. Omni-Tech. And a whole bunch of others. And how he's going to buy a new jacket made of this stuff, as soon as he figures out what exactly the best stuff is, if he can find a jacket that fits, which is always a huge problem given the size of his pects, not to mention getting the right colors, which is a whole nother class of mental exfoliation for him to get into. And at first you fight to keep all this out of your brain because you know it's all made up, aside from the brand names, and maybe them too, and if it gets into your brain it will only stick there like used chewing gum, or like when you're learning a language and get a word wrong the first day and then you can never change it back to what it really is, and here is this guy shoveling this stuff straight into your head, and fighting it as much as you can fight you still finally have to give up and let it come in through one ear and roll around and dribble out the other ear if possible. But despite that, some of it sticks to the inside of your head and you're never quite the same again anyway. So when Zero-Mile Mark says the two of you really should do a shakedown trip next week to get all sorted out and tuned up for the upcoming season you say Sure, and set a date, and a time, and you know that's the end of it, and all you have to do is make sure your voicemail is working because as close as he's going to get to hiking is calling you six seconds before you're due to roll up in front of his place to pick him up, and telling you he's got a sore throat, or his wife is scared or the cat has hairballs or his mother's hemorrhoids are flaring up again. Now if you could figure out a way of never seeing him again, well and good, but he is your boss, so...
    (3) An arbitrary point where you decide to start something. Because every good story needs a beginning, a middle, and an end, you have to pick the beginning or you have no journey, and hence no story to lie about. Because beginning sounds so ordinary you choose to call yours the zero-mile mark. Due to an unusually felicitous conjunction of forces (and possibly due to a plot hatched by those really behind everything that happens) the zero-mile mark is also the zero-kilometer mark, the zero-furlong mark, the zero-parsec mark, zero-light year mark, the zero-fathom mark, the zero-league mark, the zero-Smoot mark, the zero-verst mark, and the zero-li mark. In fact, no matter how you slice it, zero is always zero, which seems like an incredible coincidence unless you understand that the entire game is rigged, after which it all becomes much simpler. No need to go backpacking then. Just lie and say you did. Tell how you slid one foot under the fence at the border, touched foreign-ness on the far side, and relentlessly slogged for months and months, suffering all sorts of indignities and starvation until you reached that other, equally pointless border and slid another of your body parts under, over, around, or through the barrier there, and then go home and buy someone else's photo collection to show off at parties and family gatherings. Works every time. Meanwhile, instead of doing all that nasty and sweaty hiking you could really be off to some civilized beach, contentedly napping in a hammock and being brought drinks by a flock of sweet agreeable things with loose morals as they quaintly used to call a tendency toward agreeable fun.

Zipper Pull:
    (1) The amount of political, economic, social, or personal influence that your zipper has on the world. If you're laughing at this, then you are not famous and your very own zipper (and everything near it) has no pull. Loozah!
    (2) A competitive and frantic backpacking sport, but played solo. It's just you pitted against that package of fig newtons you ate two hours ago. Good luck, because losing isn't funny. To you.
    (3) That little dangly thing hanging off the zipper which you pull on as the first step in the process of bleeding your lizard, or which you pull on to cut off the draft after you've finished with the lizard stuff. NO — it's the little dangly thing ON the zipper, not the other thing. The zipper pull is attached to the slider, which is the part that pulls together the nasty teeth, which are in turn attached to the zipper tape, which is sewn into your garment, which is why it's all so solid and can get such a firm and unforgettable grip on you if you don't pay attention to what you are doing and how you are doing it.
    (4) That deeply tingling feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you step off the platform and go shooting down the zip line, especially if you discover, one or more microseconds too late, that only one end of the zip line is actually attached to anything. Also known as: Gravity.

Zipper Sizes: Zippers do come in various sizes, like so:
  Number 10 — The width of the teeth of the zipper teeth when interlocked is 10 millimeters wide. This is a heavyweight zipper.
  Number 5 — Has a width of 5 millimeters, so it's a medium-weight.
  Number 3 — Its width when closed is 3 millimeters. It's a lightweight. And
  Number 0 — The width of this zipper when closed, if this sort of zipper existed, would be zero millimeters, making it truly invisible, and impossible to locate when it was time to drop your pants and do that thing. With, you know, unfortunate results.

Zipper:
    (1) Basic component of the Zip Stove. The zipper allows for the stove's modular construction and easy setup-and-teardown capabilities.
    (2) A long, linear button with teeth.
    (3) A peepee shark. (Guys know this one.)
    (4) A temporary sew job. Also known as a sew job with benefits, those being EZ-Open, and EZ-Close, plus that satisfying purring sound. Unless the peepee shark gets you. In which case the sound is not satisfying, and you have to make it yourself. But it is usually loud enough to scare away anything dangerous.
    (5) The peak of western civilization, only recently superseded by the pop-top aluminum beer can, which can be used to easily make stoves from, unlike most zippers. This is (the zipper) a device for connecting two pieces of fabric by means of doohickies on each side that, when pushed together the right way, jam together and don't come loose until you really need them to hold. Zippers can be closed-ended, open-ended, single-ended, double-ended, invisible (I'd like to see that!), coil, metallic, molded plastic, waterproof, and rated for the vacuum of space (which is this giant big thing that travels around sucking up planets and galactic dust bunnies and stuff). Zippers are also really good for trying to eat that little wind flap that you see beside the zipper on jackets and so on, but can't. Zippers always gag on that, jamming themselves and having fits and getting stuck half closed. That's the pessimist's view. Optimists get their zippers stuck half open. They also don't believe in the peepee shark. Yet.
    (6) OK, time for some general background info. A zipper consists of two strips of fabric tape, each permanently attached to one of the two flaps that it joins together. Each zipper has from tens to hundreds of metal or plastic teeth. The slider, the part that gets pulled by hand, rides up and down the two sets of teeth. Inside the slider is a Y-shaped channel that pushes the opposing set of teeth together (forward) or pulls them apart (reverse). Friction of the slider against the teeth produces that characteristic buzzing sound. (And it may be where the name zipper came from.) Some zippers have slides on both ends, which allows for varying the size and position of the opening. Elias Howe, the American inventor of the first practical sewing machine, developed an early zipper-like device he called an Automatic, Continuous Clothing Closure, which he patented in 1851, but it was never commercialized. In 1891 (or possibly 1893), Whitcomb Judson patented a similar Clasp Locker, for fastening shoes, and marketed it through his Universal Fastener company. Both his and Howe's designs used hooks and eyes rather than the now-familiar teeth. Today's design, based on interlocking teeth, was invented in 1913 by one of Judson's employees, the Swedish scientist Gideon Sundback. It was originally called the Hookless Fastener, though patented in 1917 as the Separable Fastener. The B. F. Goodrich Company coined the name Zipper in 1923, and used it in tobacco pouches and on boots. It wasn't until the 1920s that the zipper was first used in clothing, specifically for men's trousers and in clothes for children.