Back then, on my meager college student budgets, I bought high quality gear and treated it well. And it has amazingly lasted for a long time.
But now it's time to upgrade.
The old gear, while still a lot of it quite serviceable, is by today's standards, like lugging around lead bricks. So I'm looking forward to to some new lightweight gear to make the trip a lot more enjoyable to gear and fabrics and not only much lighter, but also perform better and a whole lot of ways to breathable fabrics that are probably a lot more breathable than my 30 year old sweat-tex. The old gear lacked DWR coatings so it would wet out fairly quickly. And a lot of the seams were not seam sealed on my old gear. So in a good rainstorm, things got wet. But then it probably didn't matter much because I was sweating so much inside the gear wearing wool and some synthetics that I was going to be soaking wet either way.
Back in the day, a lightweight pack for a three day climbing trip might weigh 45 pounds. If I was really lucky, I could get it down maybe a bit below 40 pounds. And on some trips that were long and had a lot of technical gear 70 and 80 pounds was not out of the question. But I'm a bit older and wiser now. And playing Pack Mule to 80 pounds worth of gear is not my thing.
So let's go for the ultra-lightweight routine.
Our goal was to get our base pack weights down below 15 pounds. And I think we can do it easily. Keep in mind we're hiking as a couple. So some of the items, we get to split and share the weight. The tent, sleeping pads, two person quilt, cooking gear, all gets split evenly between us. Although if I was a real gentleman, I'd probably take a few extra pounds in my pack. But we'll see.
I should also say that in our gear selection, while weight matters, we are, shall we say, frugal. So cost matters too. If I was Warren Buffett, I would probably just buy out the Mount Bell store and call it a day. But I'm not. So along with buying some new gear, there's also going to be some MYOG make my own gear items thrown in.
So the purpose of this post is really to give you an idea of what's in or going into our packs. It's not really intended to be a long term gear review on any of this stuff. Those those reviews will come later. So in our decision process, here's where we are.
- For Packs, we're looking at UCLA Circuits.
- For a tent we have a Tarp Tent MOTRAIL (2) person tarp tent with a polycro ground cloth to go with it.
- For sleeping system, we've got an Exped two person the SynMatt with a MYOG two person quilt.
- We picked up a pair of Sea to Summit pillows. And that completes our sleep system.
- One thing to keep in mind on a long distance hike, you're probably going to spend half your day in bed so this is not a place to scimp on our quilt. The plan is to use 900 or above fill down and probably overfill it. There's no point in being cold for a couple extra ounces of down.
- For cooking I think we're going to go with two stoves. First one will be a cat food can alcohol stove really intended as a backup or two just give us a second stove while breakfast or dinner is cooking and we just want to heat some water. The stove is a Snow Peak LiteMax butane stove
- For a pot, I'm using one of my 30 year old aluminum pots because, so far, it seems to have the capacity and be lighter than anything else I can find these days. If I found a nice titanium pot that was bigger, I'd probably jump on it.
- And we're both carrying a 12 ounce titanium cup and a spork. The Titanium cup gives us the ability to stick it on the stove and reheat your coffee or tea or hot chocolate or boil water in it to purify the water. I'm probably going to make an insulated wrap for it just to keep whatever is in it warm (it cools down quickly). Fortunately, Glide and I happen to like each other. So for dinner and other meals, we pretty much just grab our sporks and dig into the pot that we cooked in and eat directly out of it saves cleaning up extra dishes and cleaning up the cup. So the cups will be pretty much liquids and drinks only.
- For hiking shoes, we're both going to try out some Altra Lone Peaks and see how they work for us. Truthfully we're both more comfortable with something that more resembles a sturdy or hiking shoe or lightweight hiking boots. But we're going to go with the flow and try the Lone Peaks because that's what everybody else seems to be hiking and probably will have some MYOG dirty girl type gators to go with.
- We also picked up some Cascade Mountain Tech carbon fibre hiking poles at Costco last year. The price was more than right I think they were $35 a pair and we use them all last summer. And we love them. I've read some reviews that were less than favorable about the clamps and some other things on them but properly adjusted, they work just fine. And I've held them up to the hundred and $60 Leiki poles. And for the extra hundred and $30 in my pocket. I'm really happy with our purchase because I didn't see much that I liked a whole lot better on the Leiki's.
Eddie Bauer is a name has been around for forever. I probably have some 30 plus year old Eddie Bauer gear someplace in my gear closet. But I never thought that it would be the place that I would be buying ultra light gear for our through hikes. So a short time ago. We were wandering through the mall on one of my two times a year visits to the mall and decided to wander into the Eddie Bauer store just to see what was going on.
I was kind of surprised.
The quality was certainly everything I've always expected it to be. But they actually had some real outdoor gear there in terms of packs and flowing over on the down jacket rack. Over on the down jacket rack. I spied their Cirrus light down jacket. It looked nice and puffy, looked like it was going to be plenty warm and was on sale.
My only concern was was it going to be too heavy. When your comparison is a 6 oz Mount Bell jacket. I knew we weren't going to be that low. So the question was how much heavier was it going to be went back a couple weeks later with my kitchen scale in hand and stuck it on the scale. The extra large jacket that I got came in at 10 ounces. While it's 70% heavier than the Mount Bell, the Mount Bell is $400. And ultimately, after these jackets went on sale, I paid $50 for it. It's a deal you couldn't pass up. And I'll be happy to carry the extra four ounces and leave the $350 in my wallet. Plus, if anything happens to it, I'll be out 50 bucks and I'll probably be more pissed about whether I'll be able to find a replacement for $50 then I will be for the fact that the jacket got damaged.
For rain gear my original plan was to use my Marmot Precip rain jacket. It works. It's waterproof, but it did tip the scales at 10 ounces. The same as the down jacket. Again at Eddie Bauer, I spied their feather light rain jacket. It was made out of some high tech fancy waterproof fabric, i.e. I'm still going to sweat inside of it. But it tips the scale at 6 ounces, 4 oz lighter than my Marmot and was out the door on sale at a wallet breaking $35. Unless it leaks like a sieve, and it won't, it would have been a bargain at twice that price.
Thank you Eddie Bauer from looking after our cross country cost conscious thru hikers. I'm going to finish up the rain gear with an MYOG rain kilt. Stay tuned for that project, they're going to be killer.
The rest of my gear for clothing is somewhat in the state of flux. So I'm going to sort that out over the next few months,
I'd like to say I'm going to go on a long distance hike with only a paper map and a compass. Some how the electronics seem to creep into the equation. We'll have one cell phone with us where we can run the GutHook app.
And I'm going to be carrying a Columbus P-1 GPS data recorder. No displays on this other than some flashing lights. Its main purpose is to record where we went and allow me to take that track and match it up to photos after the trip to geo-locate the photos.
I'm also going to carry this Sony Digital Voice Recorder (ICD-PX470) to write blog entries and make other notes.
So there you have it the start of our updated gear list for our hike.
Stay tuned for updates.
Transcribed by Otter.ai voice transcription
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