Date: 2017-11-30
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Leaving Harpers Ferry, I expect my pack to weigh 26 pounds, including 4 days of food and 1-1/2 liters of water. This is a considerable improvement over the 58 pounds I started with in 1994! It¢s easy to obsess over pack weight and hikers can get very childish at times comparing gear and weights. It is rather like two little boys comparing their wee wees and about as profound. Hikers often speak in terms of ¢base weight¢ and the weight of their ¢big three.¢ To me, base weight means the weight of my backpack and everything in it that I¢m not going to consume. I include my first aid kit in base weight, because I hope not to need it, but I exclude food, water, fuel, toilet paper, chapstick, sunscreen, bug spray, toothpaste and floss, soap and Aleve, along with the clothing I¢ll be wearing and the hiking poles that I¢ll carry. Defined in this way, my base weight is 15 pounds. The big three refers to the empty backpack, tent, and sleeping bag, a total weight of 5.6 pounds for me. My base weight of 15 pounds is actually 4 pounds more than I carried in 2006. True ultralight aficionados, sometimes called gram weenies, will find this shocking and condemn me to the rack or to the pillory or sentence me to hike Pennsylvania repeatedly. They will scoff that I now carry a bear canister weighing two pounds more than the bear bag and line it replaces. They will guffaw that I need a heavier backpack to carry the canister, another wasted pound, and be incredulous that I carry a ground cloth (3.3 ounces), a small piece of closed cell foam as a seat (1.1 ounces) and camp shoes (7.4 ounces). Adding pack weight is hiker blasphemy, and I am an unrepentant apostate.  I won¢t attempt to justify myself, lest I lead you astray from the straight and narrow path to ultralight salvation, but I will try to explain the process I use in making my gear selections. Read on at the peril of your backpacking soul!Ideally an item of gear would weigh nothing, cost nothing, and perform every desired function perfectly without effort. You would only need one such item, since it would do everything. Cartoonist Al Capp envisioned such perfection, calling it a shmoo. A shmoo looks like a mustached marshmallow, with legs but no arms, with eyes but neither nose nor ears. What marvelous creatures! They reproduce asexually, more fecund than bunny rabbits, requiring no sustenance other than air. Shmoos are delicious to eat and like nothing better than to be eaten. They will gladly fry themselves, tasting just like chicken; roast themselves, tasting like pork; broil themselves, tasting like steak; or bake themselves, tasting like catfish. Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell. Shmoos have no bones, so there is no waste. They will gladly produce neatly packaged eggs, bottled milk, and butter. Sliced thin, they are a perfect leather, and sliced thick, they are like lumber. Why, the whiskers even make perfect toothpicks!  A single shmoo would be ideal in every way for backpacking. You wouldn¢t even have to carry one, since a shmoo can walk. Unfortunately shmoos do not exist outside of the Li¢l Abner comic strip, and neither does perfect backpacking gear. Reconcile yourself to this: Whatever gear you buy costs too much, weighs too much, and there¢s something out there or soon will be that works better. And ultimately, it doesn¢t matter, because backpacking isn¢t about gear. It¢s about you. You will quickly realize that the constraints, like weight and cost, often operate contrarily, making every gear decision a compromise. You are searching for the optimal gear for you, not the shmoo of gear. I¢ll start with a relatively simple topic that will quickly become complex. Water treatment. My first step is defining the problem, indeed, deciding if there is a problem. Is there risk in drinking untreated water along the Appalachian Trail? When I started hiking in the Smokies in the early 1970¢s, I never treated water. I often didn¢t even carry water, because it was so abundant. I would simply dip my Sierra cup into a spring or stream or hold it against water dripping down rock and drink. Cold, refreshing. I never had a problem with diarrhea or other trail-related diseases. Of course, there were far fewer hikers back then. If I heard about water-borne pathogens at all, it was Giardia lamblia, a cute little protozoan with several whip-like flagella. Back then, it was popularly called beaver fever. There were relatively few beaver 50 years ago, and besides, as it turns out, it hasn¢t been demonstrated that the type of Giardia carried by beaver causes giardiasis in humans. To quote another great cartoonist of the period Walt Kelly, ¢We have met the enemy and he is us.¢ In my entry on backcountry sanitation, ¢Where do you use the bathroom?¢ I list pathogens associated with human feces and related diseases. Suffice it to say that there are many, and that not all hikers practice Leave-No-Trace, not to mention upstream sources of contamination.Try Googling ¢frequency of water borne diseases on Appalachian Trail,¢ to get a feeling for whether this is really an issue at all. Pay particular attention to articles linked to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. In an unscientific survey of 2016 long-distance hikers on the AT, 4.8% of hikers reported contracting a waterborne illness.  An earlier study based on medical interviews of 334 long-distance AT hikers, found that 31% of the hikers failed to achieve their goals, the most common medical complaints being feet blisters (64%), diarrhea (56%), and acute joint pain (36%). Obviously some of these hikers enjoyed more than one ailment. A decreased risk of gastrointestinal illness was associated with better personal hygiene practices, cleaning cookware, and treating surface water. I¢ve concluded that there is an unquantified risk associated with drinking untreated water along the Appalachian Trail, primarily diarrhea associated with several microorganisms, that the risk is non-trivial, and that treating the water reduces the risk.  How to deal with that risk? The 2016 AT hiker survey found that 63% reported always treating their water, 2% never treating it, and 35% falling somewhere in-between. Of those who treat, 80% employ a filter, 14% use liquid chemical treatment, 4% use UV light, and 2% choose tablets. The frequency of treatment has increased over the years as filter and chemical options have become far more convenient to use. I am pleased to see that the ceramic cartridge filter I used in 1994 is no longer manufactured. It required superhuman pressure to generate even a trickle of clean water and clogged easily. As a result, I seldom used it, but I did carry it as a magical talisman, and it worked well in that capacity. In 1997, I switched to the Pur Hiker (now the Katadyn Hiker) weighing 11 ounces, yielding 1 liter/minute with minimal effort. Hint: Occasionally apply silicone lubricant to the piston o-ring!  When I became weight-obsessed, I switched to chemical treatment using Aquamira, a two-reagent system weighing 3 ounces. It was simple to use. Mix seven drops of each reagent in the provided bottle cap and wait five minutes to generate chlorine dioxide; add to a liter of untreated water; shake; wait 15-20 minutes; enjoy! It has a slightly sharp aftertaste, like municipal water treated with chlorine, but is much less objectionable than iodine. The required waiting can seem interminable if you are thirsty.I currently use a Sawyer Squeeze filter, weighing 3.2 ounces including residual water. I fill a 2-liter bladder (1.3 ounces) with untreated water and squeeze it through the filter. I also carry a crushable HydraPak Speed Cup weighing 0.2 ounces to scoop up water into the bladder when necessary. When I¢m hiking into a dry camp, I can stop at a spring, filter 2 liters of water and carry the full ¢dirty¢ bladder into camp, assuring plenty of water for cooking and to start the next day¢s hike.  I tried the lighter Sawyer Mini Filter (1 ounce less) and found it more prone to clogging. I¢m satisfied with the Sawyer Squeeze. It¢s light-weight, inexpensive at $40, effective, and easy to use. I also carry 10 Katadyn Micropur tablets (0.2 ounces) in my repair kit as backup.I¢ve never tried UV treatment, like the SteriPEN. The SteriPEN Ultra model weighs 5 ounces and costs $100. The USB rechargeable batteries are said to treat up to 50 liters of clear water. Cloudy or sediment-laden water requires prefiltration. The hikers who carry the SteriPEN like it a lot. It¢s certainly easy to use: submerge the tip, press the button, stir once, and wait 90 seconds until the light goes off.  This typifies my approach to gear in general: Identify the problem; consider the range of solutions, including the do-nothing alternative; evaluate effectiveness, cost, weight, and ease of use; decide; repeat as necessary. I have two large plastic bins of rejected gear to illustrate the last step. You can see that I¢m tempted by the SteriPEN. If I were more adept at applying my own methodology, perhaps I wouldn¢t have purchased 8 tents and 10 backpacks in the last 25 years. You can see my current favorites in the GEAR side tab.There¢s a tradeoff between comfort in camp and comfort on the trail. If you are constrained for time and need to stack up big mileage days, sacrificing camp luxuries is an obvious approach. As for me, I¢ve found that so long as my fully loaded backpack weighs under 30 pounds, it doesn¢t make much difference. I tried going without camp shoes. Getting up at night to pee and having to put on wet hiking shoes was most unpleasant.  A light Cuben Fiber ground cloth is great under my sleeping pad in shelters and spread in a grassy clearing, makes a pleasant place for stretching or for a nap. As I lose weight on the trail, I find that I really appreciate a small piece of closed-cell foam to use as a seat. I also use it as a kneeling pad by the door of my tent. Why should hiking the Appalachian Trail be a death march of pain and deprivation? Two or three pounds of little things is all it takes to make me a happy hiker.