Date: 2010-02-25
To: Prep #17
Miles today: 0.0

6 POUNDS OF FEARMet with my hiking partner, Keith, this morning. Our last meeting before we head out of Chicago on Tuesday. He has a digital scale and I wanted to put definitive numbers on all those items for which I had estimated the weight. Somehow, some way, my pack weight including food, water and fuel had ballooned up to almost 36 pounds in the last few weeks. The good news is that a lot of the small stuff weighed less than I estimated so I was able to shave off ounces and fractions of ounces here and there. The bad news is that some of my bigger items had been estimated too light. Not good. Would my "luxury" items (camera, paper and pencil, silver spoon and pillow) have to go?   Do I really have to cut my toothbrush handle off? TAGS! Cut off all the tags! Get rid of the spiral bound notebook and carry loose sheets of paper instead. Net weight savings = a mere 4 ounces. What next? Can't do much about the big gear decisions, but what about all the little stuff? Nail clippers only needed once every two weeks. When I need it, I can buy a cheap clipper in town and leave it there. What else? I start going through my items one by one and find nothing easily discarded. But then I realize that I'm keeping a number of things "in case I _______" and my mind quickly gives a rational answer to fill in the blank. "In case I get cold." "In case I burn myself." "In case my headlamp breaks." "In case I get hungry." I'm not a hypochondriac but my favorite string of rationalizations had to do with "In case I get a cold/diarrhea/headache/upset stomach/pink-eye/sprained ankle, etc."   That's when I realized I had started packing to my fears, including the fear of inconvenience. So I started to go item-by-item and think through what the MacGyver in me would do if I needed a particular item and didn't have it with me.   I started to draw on past experiences of when things went wrong in the woods and what I did. Those were great memories and I found I was grinning at the time we ran out of insect repellent in Florida. We tied our extra t-shirts around our faces, heads and necks covering as much of our skin as possible and built a half dozen smoky smudge fires around camp. We looked like terrorists and smelled like we had just fought a 4-alarm fire, but we stayed free of mosquito bites. Or the time there was a fuel line failure in my stove and we had to build a fire to cook our food. Easy, right? Except it had been raining for three days and the woods were saturated¢or so we thought. Brush away the top layer of needles from under a pine tree and you find dry needles. Pine cones still on the tree are only wet on the outside, the inside is dry and full of combustible sap. Roll a downed log over and there's dry leaves, moss and burnable detritus there. Used our windscreen and a knife to build a supercharger. Started a one-match fire in the "supercharger" with the dry kindling we had gathered which burned hot enough to ignite the larger wet kindling which was hot enough to ignite the small wet branches and then the larger wet logs. It took about an hour before we could cook. Because it was so hard-earned, it was one of the best tasting meals I ever had in the woods.Good memories. Why? Because the adversity unleashed the ingenuity and gave a huge sense of satisfaction in overcoming the challenge.Bottom line, the fear gear is gone and the pack is under 30 pounds.