When The Relationship Gets Serious
– The fuzzy parts. –
Fabric is most of your pack. No matter what happens technologically, fabric or something like fabric will always be most of your pack. If it's something we haven't seen yet, and is something we wouldn't call fabric the first time we bump into it, it will still have to play the same role. It's a moot point.
Whatever your pack is made of, it will have to get along with your body. It will have to open up wide for loading, handle compression and expansion and sunshine and freezing wind, rain, dust, mud and all the rest. It will have to carry loads and keep doing that day after day, year after year, for as long as you can stand to have it around.
Things are good now. No doubt the future, at some time, will see better materials, but they will have to be exceptionally good to beat what we have today.
You can still buy cotton canvas packs. Huh, you might think, That would be pretty dumb, right? Maybe not.
Cotton is good. If the fabric is thick enough, and has the right weave, and the pack is well made, cotton has a lot of the right stuff. It's quiet, durable, hard to tear, hard to cut, hard to poke holes in, hard to abrade, can be made nearly waterproof, and can outlast its first owner. Treat it poorly and all bets are off. Cotton molds. It rots. Its fibers hold onto dirt. A cotton pack can fall apart, and eventually it will, just like every other kind of pack. But if you take care of what you have you can come out ahead, in dry country.
That's what we're talking about here. It isn't really about materials, it's about the stuff between your ears and how well that works. Put in a little bit of effort every now and then and you can maintain a profitable and friendly long term relationship with your pack, without having the bottom fall out way too many miles from home.
– Rips, shreds, and toothmarks. –
A lot of unfortunate things happen on the trail. We'll ignore you and think about how your pack sees things.
Your pack is afraid of some things, and you should be too, if you are its friend.
One of these things is being pulled in two directions at once. That's what causes tears. Most commercially made packs are overbuilt. Call this good or bad, it's the way things are. Packs are overbuilt so you can act like an idiot and not have your pack fail. Even though you should expect it to. Overbuilding means using thicker fabric, and more of it. Overbuilding means more of everything. More means heavier, and more expensive too. Some of that is good and some is not.
Even if you make your own packs you want them to hold together. If you make packs for other people, and sell them, and have to support yourself and your family and zillions of employees, you do not want a bunch of idiots suing you. So you make it hard for them. Really hard. You overbuild.
The way you do that is to design a pack, and test it until you get dizzy and the pack comes apart. Then you figure out what happened, and when, and how to prevent it. What you end up with is a pack that's designed and built not to come apart no matter what. You get there by reinforcing things, and using a big thing when a small thing should work, and mostly by using heavier fabric, and more of it.
More stuff built into a pack makes it more expensive and heavier. Designing a pack to be bulletproof is more expensive than taking a wild guess and hoping for the best. Testing is costly. But getting sued constantly is much worse, so pack makers try hard to prevent us from producing the failures we deserve.
Pull on the wrong part of a pack, or pull in the wrong way, and something will tear. If the pack is strong and made well then nothing will tear right away. Whatever part of the pack you mistreat will get damaged a little, then a little more, and a little more, and eventually the problem will get big enough to see. But this might take years unless you are really stupid and really strong.
All fabric tears. It happens because some of the fibers in the yarns in the fabric get overstressed and pop. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of these in every thread. You can keep doing this for a long time before it's noticeable, one fiber at a time, then one yarn at a time, then one thread at a time. Woven fabrics are nice this way. They fail progressively. But they will fail if you force them to.
All fabric can be poked to death. You've seen this. No surprise there.
Packs, because of how they are used, get stressed when loaded. Packs are made for carrying weight. Stands to reason.
– Be smart, look smug, get noticed. –
There are some things you can do.
One, be careful when picking up a loaded pack and when putting it down. A lot of packs have a haul loop. This is a separate handle at the top, between the shoulder straps. It is there for a reason, and that reason is to pick up the pack without causing damage.
Hold the pack by this haul loop and it will hang straight down from the loop. Use one shoulder strap instead and you are pulling off to one side. Shoulder straps aren't made for that. Even if they are over built. You'll see problems, eventually. Use the haul loop, and as much as you can, use two hands to pick up the pack or to set it down.
Poking holes in your pack isn't good. Duh?
Luckily it's harder to do than it sounds. If you make an ultralight pack out of super light fabric it will be easier to poke holes in it. But the typical store-bought pack is made of something resembling stainless steel mesh. It's hard to poke through. Really hard. The stray cactus needle isn't a problem. Poking is itself not really a problem. The real problem is more like localized abrasion, and this has to do, more than anything, with how you treat your pack when it's off your body.
Do not sit on your pack. Do not set it on rocks or anything abrasive. A downed tree with smooth bark is OK, but some wood is more like steel bristles, and that will hurt a pack, so check first. Watch out for rock outcrops. Don't brush by them as you walk. Thorny bushes too. Your instincts steer you clear of these anyway, but remember that they'll hurt your pack too.
Sitting on a pack multiplies stresses. Your pack is already full of heavy things, barely held together by that good old fabric bag and some compression straps. Laying it down on a bunch of rocks and then putting all your weight on top of it is something than no pack is designed for. If you do it anyway, and don't see a problem, just keep doing it. Some day you will see the problem. Because you are doing one of the most hurtful things you can do. It's your life, so do what you want, but remember that everything you do has an effect. Some effects you will not like.
Even so, a fully loaded pack might suffer less than a partly loaded pack. At least a pack stuffed full is evenly stressed. Or it should be. Loading is important.
Even if you carry so much weight that you can hardly stand it, as long as your pack is loaded well, then things aren't that bad. Balance the load so you can carry it and you've done a lot to ensure success. Loads should balance right to left, and be high enough to carry well when you walk. Get the weight distributed so it isn't all in one lump. You just about have to do this to carry it anyway, but at least be aware of the principles involved. In case you have to take on an extra load of water right before looking for a camp site, spread the load around, so you and your pack can carry it gracefully.
If weight is balanced and distributed you put the minimum stress on any one part.
– (De)Contaminate me. –
Wash your pack. Remember this and do it as often as you can.
Some packs, made of some materials, by some companies, shouldn't be washed the way you would wash a sweatshirt. OK. Don't be dumb. No throwing packs into washing machines. Do the hand wash thing. The old churning mechanical agitator will churn your pack too. You don't want a churned pack.
Do a hand wash with lots and lots of rinsing. Unless your pack is made of something that doesn't allow it. Which is hard to figure out since packs stand up to rain, heat, cold, and dust, not to mention sweat. So if your pack is made of cotton candy, then don't wash it. And if you are thinking about buying a pack, and see that it's dry clean only, or you have to send it back to Tasmania after every trip, well maybe you'd rather have a different pack.
Whatever happens, the important thing is to keep it clean.
Why? Because grit and goo work their way into the fabric (the same happens with clothes). Once lodged in there, the grit rubs around on the fabric endlessly, and makes tiny cuts everywhere. This is microscopic damage but it weakens the fabric. The goo and sweat you contribute either rots or provides a nice home for fungi and whatnot. Pack fabric might be nearly indestructible all by itself, but get it full of abrasive grit, and let various life forms set up housekeeping inside it, and eventually the miracle of reality will enter your life. Your pack will get old before its time.
What to worry about? Dirt and dust. Mud. Good clean dirt is most of what you will see. You can do a lot up front to protect your pack by keeping it out of the dust and out of the mud. No matter though, your pack will inevitably pick up a lot of dirt.
Brush it off.
That will work until you get home. By the time you get home you'll have more on your list than dust.
Like bodily secretions. You'll be sweating lots. This is good. It means that you are alive and well. The stuff you sweat out soaks into your pack and stays there until you remove it. Most of it is water, which takes care of itself by evaporating. No problem.
Next up, salts. Blood is really like sea water, except for the color. Sweat is like blood without the color, which makes it almost identical to sea water. Sea water is salty. Once the water evaporates out of your sweat, what is left is salt. Call it minerals if you like. Same deal, it's not good to have this embedded in your pack. Luckily it rinses right out.
Not so with the rest of what's in sweat. There will be some organic compounds. A little of whatever is inside you comes out through your skin. You are what you sweat. The skin also makes oil. This is good for your skin. It keeps it from drying out and cracking. This is why hand lotion feels good. The oil covers your skin and keeps it moist.
Oil from your body also soaks into your pack, and that isn't so good. Again, this won't eat through the fabric, but it does hold onto dirt and grit and anything else around, and it adds to the natural fertilizer content that your body supplies, and those aren't great to have soaked into your pack.
– Bug me already. –
But that isn't all. You probably use sunscreen, and that is more oil plus who knows what. Slather a bunch on your arms and then every time you pull on your pack you scrape some of it onto your pack's shoulder straps, and some more of it ends up at every spot where you touch the pack.
But worse, there is bug repellent. Almost all of this stuff should be kept away from all synthetic fabrics. It eats them. If you carry a cotton pack you are probably OK. Cotton is made of cellulose, which is a long chain sugar, which vastly predates industrial chemicals and is so impervious to most things that fallen trees can lie on the forest floor for centuries before they rot away entirely.
Nylon, polyester, polyethylene, all kinds of new age substances used in modern fabrics are industrial chemicals themselves, and susceptible to industrial solvents, which things like DEET are. Bug juice can eat your pack for lunch. So look out.
Bug repellent, sunscreen, hand lotion, soap, detergent, all these will either eat your pack or soak into it and hold onto grit and sweat and goo and help them to work against your pack. All of these are good things to wash out. As is stove fuel.
Most people use canister stoves these days, and that kind of fuel doesn't really spill. It's a gas at normal temperature and pressure, so no worry there. White gas is not good, and kerosene is worse, but few people use those any more. Even alcohol though can soften and weaken some synthetics. It too evaporates, but you don't know what anonymous trace substances are dissolved in it, so wash your pack anyway. Remove all residual glop.
– Melting in your glowy radiance. –
You know enough not to set your pack on fire. If not, then memorize this: don't.
But you don't have to burn the sucker to have a bad day. If you leave a pack too close to an open fire, you might get back an open pack. Synthetics melt, most of them, pretty easily. At least, at the very least, heat weakens fabric. You don't want the side of your pack to blow out. Or the bottom, or any of it at all, so take it easy. Be conservative, be cautious. Sometimes that's good.
The same goes for stoves. Since a stove is smaller and more orderly looking and its heat is more focused you might be tempted to treat it as a friend. But you'll be sorry if you force your pack and your stove kiss each other. They are natural enemies. At least one of them will receive hurt. Stoves burn at least as hot as open fires, maybe hotter overall, so look out.
So then, light, as in lighting your pack, is bad.
So is sunlight. Surprise! Sunlight is full of secret and dangerous ultraviolet radiation, and if you expose your pack to a lot of it your pack will become ultraviolated. Polyethylenes like Spectra or Dyneema have a high level of resistance to ultraviolet, but even if your pack is made of them your whole pack is not made of them. Polyester is more resistant than nylon, but weaker overall, and isn't used so much in pack bags. Mostly you're dealing with nylon, which is good, still a miracle fabric after all these decades, but the less sun it sees the better.
Not that you have to really worry. There is not much you can do, aside from keeping your pack in the shade if you happen to think of it. Going off on a day long side trip and leaving your pack in camp, in the sun all day, would not be great. Sure, your pack is out in the sun when you're hiking, but it isn't just sitting there with the same one side pointed up all day. So if you think of it then don't leave your pack lying out in the open if you don't have to. Eventually the sun will get to it. Even so, the pack may still outlast you. At least packs don't sunburn and peel.
– That's a nice frame you got there, Mr Johnson. –
In the old days, if your pack had a frame, it was aluminum. Nothing eats aluminum. Aluminum doesn't rust, or rot, or do much of anything.
This is good.
But these days a lot of strange things find their way into pack frames. Sometimes you can't be sure just what they are, but on the other hand most of those frames are tucked inside somewhere. Out of sight, out of mind, and all the rest. You shouldn't need to worry much unless you accidentally drop the whole pack into a vat of boiling solvent, or set the sucker on fire, though some really light packs have really light frames, and some of these frame components are removable. Stays, they're called, sort of like the old whale bone ribs once sewn into corsets. You can hurt those. Maybe. Most are carbon fiber now, and that's impervious-ish, but once outside the pack they are easy to step on, or lose. That's about it though.
More likely to give you trouble somewhere, sometime, is the plastic furniture that comes with your pack. The little doo-dads, buckles and snaps, the tri-glides and tensioners and cord locks and other random, nameless thingies.
Maybe and maybe not. Who knows? Use common sense. Check this stuff every trip or two. Be conservative again. Don't over stress these guys if you can avoid it, and keep them as clean as you can. That's about all you can do. A failed buckle is relatively easy to replace, but not during a trip. Be sure to carry an extra strap or at least some nylon cord that you can use to tie things together if they begin going in different directions.
You're only likely to have two kinds of problems anyway.
One is: losing something. Which can happen if that thing isn't fastened right. These little plastic things like to slide off the ends of straps and run away. That's why a lot of straps are folded over at the end, and have a permanent crimp sewn in. You might see this on the main hip belt buckle (or any buckle). Not good to lose a buckle. Cord locks are kept from straying by knots. And so on.
Two is less likely: cold. Real cold. Like below zero. This makes plastic bits brittle. Then they snap under stress. But maybe you don't backpack in northern Minnesota in the winter. Didn't think so. Then don't worry.
– Squeaky cleaning. –
So how do you clean a pack?
Eh.
Not hard.
If it's dusty, brush it off. After doing that a few times, wash it.
But before that, rinse in clear water. This will remove everything that's water soluble, like sweat. Then fill a tub with warm water and unscented laundry detergent, and agitate with your hands. Use a soft brush to scrub where you have to, and agitate as much as you can. Rub or brush areas that might be especially oily, like the shoulder straps and hip belt. Anything else ought to be OK, unless you have caked on mud somewhere, or some nameless, despicable, and rare drek.
In case of something weird like motor oil, or cooking oil, or dried, greasy food, or blood, rinse first to wet the fabric and then put full strength detergent right onto that area and scrub like crazy. If the degergent is already liquid, so much the better. If not, create a paste and begin with that. Scrub and rinse as many times as you need to.
Solvents will weaken fabric, maybe even eat through it, so stick to regular detergent and water. Rinse and repeat as needed. Detergent eventually removes even motor oil (no need to tell us how it got there - that will be your secret). And you want to thoroughly remove all traces of food. No scents make sense.
When you get tired of scrubbing and rubbing and agitating and soaking, then rinse. A lot. Use warm water. Submerge the pack and agitate with your hands. Drain and repeat a few times. Make sure that all the detergent gets rinsed out. Using unscented detergent ensures that your pack doesn't smell good enough to eat. You don't need something hungry and large following you around.
When you're done rinsing, hang up the pack so it drains and air dries. The pack ought to be fully dry overnight, even in a damp climate.
– Except... –
If the maker of your pack says to clean it another way, then do that. Whatever you do, you will end up with a pack that's so clean you'll want to get right back on the trail. When the pack is newly cleaned and dried it's a good time to give it another check for loosening seams, frayed ends, and broken or missing hardware. The washing process seems to expose loosening threads and fraying parts, so they may be more obvious. Do what you need to to return it to ship shape.
While on the trail, if your pack is slimy with dried sweat, or you have a mud event, or spill food on it, don't whine. This is not too bad, really. Take time on a sunny day, maybe while you're at lunch, and first of all empty the pack and rinse it. Rinsing the pack in a stream shouldn't classify as a sin, but if you feel like it's not right, then carry water to your pack and rinse it away from pristine water sources.
It shouldn't take that much anyway. Not that much water, or effort, or time.
Then quick like a bunny hang the rinsed pack from a tree, in the sun, and get back to lunch, turning the pack every now and then. It won't dry fully by the time you set out again, but it will be pretty good, and you can always let it finish drying overnight.
Synthetics are nice that way.
This is also another good reason to go ultralight. Since an ultralight pack is smaller, its a harder target to hit when you spill breakfast, or urp, and it will be made of lighter materials, which will dry quicker anyway. Think about it.
That's about it then. So easy.