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Why Backpack
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Sooner or later, on almost every backpacking trip I’ve ever been on,
I ask myself the same question: Why am I doing this? On some trips,
when the weather’s perfect and the trail and company genial, and
we’re somewhere especially fine, like South Kootenai Lake in the
Bitterroots, the question never arises. I feel lucky to be out, away
from work, cutting it up with friends and looking forward to setting
up camp, building a fire, and downing a bit of whatever’s in the
medicine bottle.
 Some trips just go easy, but many, for any number
of reasons, pose certain unpleasant challenges. The mosquitos have
been in your ear-wells, and up your nose, and tangled in your
eye-lashes for days and no amount of Deet makes a difference, or
you’ve hiked in at a pleasant fifty degrees only to wake up to a
foot of drifting snow and find that the trail has gone into hiding,
or the book says easy-to-moderate and you find yourself on a
crumbling ledge, looking down the wall-of-death at a boulder-rolling
stream not shown on the map. Worst of all, at least for me, you’ve
been pounding the trail all day, and after a long, punishing climb,
reach a ridge only to see the trail drops back down into a steep
ravine, with another equally long, punishing hike up the other
side–and only six miles to go across more of the same washboard.
Sweat stinging your eyes, tongue stuck to the roof of your mouth,
backpack straps seemingly fused to your collar bones, your
marathon-running, always-in-the-peak-of-condition buddy looking like
he’s having fun, a little bit of pleasure in your pain lurking in
his grin, then the question: Why am I doing this?
I’ve thought about this, a few hundred times on the trail, and I’ve
come up with many of the usual answers: like Emerson or Thoreau, I
enjoy getting out in Nature; I need the exercise; I like to hint, at
parties and such, that I’m a bit like those extreme dudes one sees
on TV, except older, out of shape, and afraid of heights. These
reasons are fine, but there’s also at least one other crucial reason
that keeps me going and makes me look forward to the next trip: the
gear.
I dig adventure gear of all kinds. I dig backpacking gear. I can’t
stay away from sporting goods stores, and I can’t wait for the next
backpacking, outside, or gear magazine or catalogue to show up in
the mail. Backpacking gear is cool: if it’s well-made and practical,
it’s compact, light, stowable, durable, usable, kind of expensive,
and eminently show off-able. Sure, a love-of-gear seems like a
pretty dubious reason to want to venture into the great outdoors,
and rather contrary to the stripped-down, simple-life, out-in-nature
ethos that backpacking aspires to, but we can be honest and admit
that, like crows, we like shiny objects (with lots of blades,
zippers, compartments, or levers). I’m always on the lookout for new
gear, for a perfect tool or wicking undershirt or headlamp that I
can add to my list of essentials, but at a certain point, finding
the next best-thing becomes an art. You’ve got the essentials
covered–never skimp on boots, sleeping bag and pad, or pack–and
you’re faced with the one, all-constraining fact: whatever else you
get, you have to carry it on your back or clip it to some part of
your kit.
Not only is finding new gear a bit of an art, but among the folks I
hike with, it would be unseemly to go too high tech. For example, we
would never bring one of those combo GPS-altimeter-barometer-camera
phone-MP3-tickertape-defibrillator wrist watches. If you want to
know where you are, that’s what a compass, topo-map, and a look
around are for, and the rest you probably don’t need in the
Bitterroots or even in the Bob or Beartooths. So what are we talking
about? Last trip, I had a brand new, unbreakable poly-carbon spork,
but my buddy had a carabiner with a built-in LCD watch, a camp-towel
that was blue and green instead of just yellow, and his new pack had
a built-in rain cover instead of a stowable one like I have. He won
that one, but I’m thinking seriously about collapsible trekking
poles or a portable backpack awning to keep the sun and rain off my
bean. Let’s see him do better than that.
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