Mommy Says Learn To Share
Group backpacking issues.
– Smile, and show us your teeth. –
There is almost nothing better than going out backpacking with a tight group of friends. You share experiences. You share ideas. Maybe food and drinks. You are not alone. No matter what, being not alone is OK, and can be intensely satisfying.
Little noticed fact, though.
The word fiend is the same as the word friend without the r. Fiend is a friend with no arr. Eh? Is this supposed to mean something?
Can't tell so far, but definitely if you are in a group then there is another dimension that has nothing to do with which pants you're wearing or where you are or anything else. Groups run by their own rules and can sour as quickly as a bucket of milk in the sun. But usually not. So let's move on.
Sharing is a big deal in groups.
You can have someone else carry things for you. This is good. The not so good part is that you might have to return the favor. Well, maybe that isn't so bad after all. I share. You share. We all share, and share fair. That's what sharing is about.
Sharing brings you closer, and might make you sweat a little, if what you carry is too heavy, but it will definitely bind you to the group you are with.
Shelter is the number one Big Heavy Thing (unless you have to have a cast iron cook stove). The good part of hiking with a group is that, if you can stand sleeping in the same tent as three other people, and someone else carries this tent built for four, then you don't have to carry anything at all, shelter-wise. This takes a big load off. Off you.
Big tents are big for a reason. They're big because they're so heavy. Most people think it works the other way around, but no, it doesn't, so letting someone else carry the tent makes your load smaller and lighter both, which is very good for your comfort level. If you can stand the snoring at night.
Snoring is not all that bad, overall.
It helps you keep track of your friends in the dark, and scares off anything that is afraid of snoring sounds. You can say that to people even though no animals whatsoever are afraid of snoring sounds. Instead, they take it as a dinner bell. A nighttime dinner bell, deep in the depths of darkness. When you are asleep. The sound travels ever so far. But you should say reassuring things to your friends so they will want to go backpacking with you.
If you don't snore and everyone else does, you're OK, since some creeping horror like a massive gigantic evil lizard monster, if attracted to your camp by snoring noises, will home in on the snorking and snuffling snoring sounds and give you your chance to run for your life.
It's always a good idea to take a small knife to bed, not for defense, but so you can cut your way out of the tent and run for your life.
Also, always wear shoes to bed so you can run better if you have to.
And don't snore, not even a little every now and then just to keep in practice. Let others snore so you may live.
What you should do is to lie in bed in the dark, keeping very still, and fall asleep quickly. If there is a problem, like a slithering bush monster, then the screams from your snoring buddies will waken you and so then you ought to have enough time to slice through the tent and beat it out of there.
That is, if the snoring doesn't keep you awake, so learn how to sleep through it. And don't forget your sleeping knife.
– Huddle for warmth. –
Next to having someone else carry your eight pound tent (some four-odd kilograms for the fussy), and being able to shed entire members of your party to feed the ravening beasts of darkness, well, sharing bedding isn't quite so enlightening, though it can be fun.
However this is recommended only for close friends, and preferably those who are as clean as or even cleaner than you, and lack scales or horns or spines or other poky bits.
Sharing a traditional sleeping bag is dicey at best, if you think of a mummy bag as traditional. Close quarters does not at all do justice to the concept, and there is no room to fart. Farting in bed can cause all sorts of problems even if you are there alone. Think about being in a tent with three large, fit, and increasingly ornery companions who do not take lightly to the idea of the person who did not even carry the tent filling their evening air with popping noises and poo-poo smell.
Now multiply this by about 10,000 (as a conservative estimate) and imagine that it's not you farting but your companion inside that one sleeping bag. Just a thought.
Leaving farts behind us there can be a whole bunch too much togetherness in shared bedding.
Probably the most likely option is to carry a double-wide quilt. If you are new to the idea, a quilt, in backpacking terms, is like a sleeping bag with no bottom side. Whatever you sleep on insulates you against the cold ground anyway, so you sort of don't need fuzzy insulation under you. It only gets smooshed down.
The smooshed stuff (usually down) is a poor insulator.
Smooshed down is a poor insulator because smooshed down that is smooshed down has few of the tiny air pockets that do the insulating and so can't insulate well at all. So you make a quilt then, and leave out the useless bottom insulation and also discard the weight of that half, and if your quilt (which is what you now have) is wide enough you can invite a friend to come and sleep over with you.
One quilt for two people saves most of the weight of the second sleeping bag or quilt, and adds body heat. Mmmm, body heat. You get to share that heat, and you can both eat crackers in bed together and play all sorts of other games too, in case you can't sleep, and know each other well enough.
But sharing a tent, and just the tent, now that saves more weight overall, considered by itself.
– Well smack my lips. –
Getting beyond farting and snoring, we come to more daytime oriented activities, such as eating.
Exactly everybody eats, and a great way to cut weight is not to eat. Barring that, and any leanings toward extreme sharing in the form of cannibalism, we return to ordinary sharing. Share a stove, share pots, share the effort of carrying food.
Person A carries the tent. Fine. (Q: "You got the tent, A?" A: "Sure do, eh?") Then what? You've increased that person's burden by six to 10 pounds (three to five kg) and need to do something to even out the load, unless your buddy is real stoopid.
Well, one person can carry the stove, pots, fuel, and water filter. People like water filters for some reason, even though they are bulky, expensive, and heavy, but you can see these disadvantages as another chance to share. So give Person B some of that.
Probably not a fair trade, but food, hey, it's heavy. And easy to package in smallish lumps. Person B can also take some food, and Person C (and any others) can take the bulk of it. That way everyone shares the burden.
But why all this sharing stuff if everyone ends up carrying heavy things anyway?
Because.
Because one tent is lighter than three or four tents, and one stove and one set of pots is lighter and more compact than a bunch of individual sets. Then there are water filters (or full water bottles), and so on.
Share not only a stove and pots but also cooking duties and food and you can save there too, at least in the amount of waste wrapping and packaging materials you end up with when done.
Six pounds (three kg) is about as light as the average double wall tent is going to get. Tarps are lighter but we're trying to make a point here, so forget tarps for a moment. So then, compare one eight pound tent with four six pounders and you come off way ahead by sharing, like about two thirds lighter over all.
With cooking and eating too. It's a little more complicated in some ways, doling out portions and so on, but if only one person needs to cook, and then one person can do the washing up, overall it's simpler. Probably quicker overall too.
It can work. If you want it too.
– But maybe not in every way. –
As in sanitation.
Don't try to form a poop group. Poop alone. Pee in solitude. Shampoo singly. Scrub solo, in isolation.
All these will work better. No need to push it. If you must (and even this is creepy) you can all stand in a circle and brush your teeth together, but you save no weight, and it's not more convenient. And it is creepy. So skip it. Unless you are creepy and you simply have to it.
Share clothing? Ummm.
This is related to sharing bedding. Let's say you are already a couple. Leave it to your friends and neighbors (and hiking companions) to decide on a couple of what. For this paragraph let's stay with the word couple, undefined, and hope for the best.
So if you are a couple, and around the same size and so on, you can share clothing. This will help a little, but it isn't a solution for a group of miscellaneous average humans who have come together for a few days and will separate out at the end of the trip and disappear into opposite ends of the universe.
And overall the sharing of clothing doesn't have much promise, as in two people vying for use of one rain jacket when it's needed. But you may be able to figure out what works for you as a couple. Hey, if you can work out a solution to farting in bed then anything could be possible.
Sharing as a practical solution does sort of come to a halt after shelter, cooking-and-water-treatment, and food. Though as mentioned, one person can even things out if you need to carry water. Water is grossly heavy, and it's always nice if there is a stray person around to stumble under the weight of that.
There are some other bits and pieces that can also be shared, like a first aid kit, if you have a big one. Binoculars or camera equipment. Books or games. But we're really quickly getting into fringe things, so you'll have to work it out per trip, per group.
– Fight with might for what's right. –
One nice thing about being a loner is that you can stand off to the side and watch everyone else fight. And one bad thing about groups is that they are made of people.
Everyone is a group is ultimately an individual. May not be bright, or clever, or industrious, or honest, or helpful, or susceptible to a pleasant compromise, but they all do each of them have some kind of mind, and that mind might not agree with yours. Or with anyone else's in the group.
Friction can erupt into roaring flames, and then you got a problem there. Luckily for your thoughtful and otherwise kindly and helpful author, this has nothing to do with backpacks so we can dodge it.
If you have problems with a group you can't rearrange things in your pack, or theirs, and make it better. That's a fundamental aspect of traveling in a group.
You can fight or not, but either course of action won't in itself make much difference. About the only things that will are being smart and being experienced. Experience comes from pain and pain comes from experience, and once you reach a certain plateau you have enough scars so nothing gets through anymore, or else you simply hike alone. Or probably, if you are like most people, you know who your friends are and get along, without thinking about it, and they return the favor.
If that doesn't work, try farting a lot and see what happens. In any case you won't be bored by the result.
– To re or not to re. –
Supply, that is.
Resupply is always a booger, except for the alternative.
In case you've fallen behind here, the alternative to resupplying is not resupplying. Figure that about the farthest you can go on a single load of food and fuel is two weeks, if you push it to the limit. You can do more but you won't want to. Not after spending two weeks on the trail and having to eat your way out from under that immense load of food.
The good news about supply, resupply, and groups is that (let the suspense build...) you can share.
This is where the odd few extra people can come in handy. Say you have one person to carry the shelter and another to carry our aforementioned pots, pans, stove, fuel, and then one person to lug food. And say you have one or two other people along, and divvying up the food supply sort of doesn't work out too well for that number of people.
Well, you can solve your problem by going on a longer trip. If you do that your food weight will go nuts on you and you'll need more weight bearing bodies to maintain an even strain. And you already have them, right there, so pile it on.
Friends. Aren't they great? Friends or donkeys, either one.
The other thing about friends, and traveling in a group with them, is that they know other people.
This is nice if, say, Ed likes backpacking, and he's with you, but his wife Mirriam refuses to either hike uphill or get sweaty, but is comfortable driving around in the back country. It's simple then. Ed has Mirriam meet y'all at the intersection of Trail Street and Highway Lane halfway through your trip, with more goodies to eat. This is truly putting people to good use. Mirriam gets to participate without perspiring, and you get to keep eating. Ed does too. Brilliant. And then you treat Mirriam to a nice restaurant meal on the drive home, and buy her flowers and a plaque.
This is one good reason to know people.
So you can use them.
– Don't be a scaredy cat. –
Let's leave Ed and Mirriam for a while. They're still pretty young and fresh and want some time alone. Let's reach into the bag of supplies, munch cookies, and have a talk about covering our butts.
When you are out alone it's all about being on the lookout for lions and tigers and bears all the time. And mice.
Mice will eat the shorts right off your behind, give them a chance. Or not. They try anyway, whether you give them a chance or not. Small enough to stomp on but too frenzied and dumb to scare away. Shoo them off and they're back in a couple of minutes, ready to buzz saw their way into your life and pack and supplies, their frantic tiny minds unable to think about anything other than gnawing and destruction.
Being with other people is a massive reassurance.
A group of four or more is too many for one grizzly bear to eat, for example. At one sitting. So you are much safer in a group. Don't even worry about cougars. A cougar might chance a quick bite to the back of the neck on a single hiker but won't go near a group. They like to hang back in the woods and watch but they won't show.
And so on for other critters (but keep a sharp lookout for mice).
Also, being with other people is just fun. You can relax. Everyone has two eyes and two ears. If you can stop fighting and get along you can enjoy the comfort of not being alone, and worry less about keeping your own eyes wide all the time. If there is a hazard, someone else will probably catch sight of it, or be eaten by it before you.
As with most things, if you're with a group you have a bigger safety margin. You should have some kind of first aid fixins, always, but if you travel in a group you can carry a real kit, and it can be big, and you can share the weight. You don't need to cram it all into your own tiny pack. And there is a good chance that someone in your group will actually have a clue about how to use it.
If something does go wrong, and you are all still injury free, it's much easier to stay that way in a group. You can cover for each other. Partly because you can, as a group, carry more resources, but also because each of you will have some expertise that no one else in the group has.
Rip a pack? Even if you have a repair kit you might not be that good at using it. Maybe the odd looking guy that someone brought along is a saddle maker, and knows how to do heavy sewing. Once he saves your trip you begin to realize that he's not all that goofy, and then you feel better about life, and know more too, and maybe have a new friend.
Forget to bring something? Something important like a second pair of socks, or aspirin? Someone else in the group can help.
Run into a serious problem, have an injury in the group, need to go for help? Since you are a group someone can stay behind and someone else can go for that help. No need to be that person with the broken leg sitting there alone for two days, in pain, in despair. Alone. More of that warm fuzzy feeling at work. More of that being not alone feeling can groups engender. Sweet.
– So don't be a butthead either. –
If you don't already do it, backpack with others. This is exactly as important as backpacking alone. Either way of traveling has its own value and teaches its own valuable lessons. Learning to negotiate, learning to accommodate other ways of living, of thinking, learning to share, they are all skills you can benefit from.
Besides having more fun you can learn how to fight fair, fight cleanly, come out the other side with everyone happy, and get over it. Unless of course you absolutely can't control your incessant farting. But maybe the allure of friends and sharing with friends will inspire you to figure that out too.
And then there are the other benefits.
Having other people along lets you share the burden and allows you to bring things you might not otherwise bring, and maybe to go places you can't get to alone. At the very least you will learn about places you never considered and will pick up some tricks you never imagined.
And a lot of these tips and tricks will be about how to use your pack, and that's what we're all about here, that pack. When you start out it's only a bag to hang on your back but expose yourself to enough people and you'll discover that there are ways of using it that you never could have imagined. Either that or one of them will turn you in. So play it safe and always keep your pants on.