Learn to Packraft was a Kickstarter project sponsored by Backpacking Light and successfully funded in early 2013. Approximately 50% of the proceeds were paid that summer for permits, equipment, a film crew, and a video producer for eleven different film shoots. Shortly thereafter, the video producer, who was the partner on this project, was unable to continue due to personal reasons. Because of the producer’s deep expertise and intimate involvement with the project, we were unable to find a replacement and the project in its original scope has been effectively on hold because of (a) our lack of video production expertise internally to move this project forward and (b) our inability to recruit an effective replacement for the original producer.
We acknowledge that all disruptions to this project, regardless of the unforeseen circumstances that led to these outcomes, are 100% my responsibility as the project manager, and the consequences must be owned by Backpacking Light as the primary funding vehicle for this project.
Here’s what we are doing in response:
In June 2014, all corporate sponsors of Learn to Packraft who helped fund the project prior to the Kickstarter launch were issued full refunds.
All corporate sponsors and backers of the Kickstarter project have been invited to request refunds. Some have taken advantage of the refund, and others have opted to continue their support.
All backers and sponsors are entitled to refunds and will continue to remain entitled to refunds until we close the project.
As of September 2022, this project remains open, and the remaining funds are earmarked in a separate account. They will continue to be set aside for projects related to the original scope of Learn to Packraft, including packrafting safety education, packrafting skills instruction, and the ultralight backpacking video content that was included as part of the stretch goal of Learn to Packraft. As this content is produced, it will remain free to the public.
If you backed this project, and are reading this and find that any of these solutions are unacceptable to you, please contact me directly so we can work out a solution together.
Throughout this humbling and difficult process, I’ve learned a lot. I’ve learned to be grateful to our community, which originally supported the project. I’ve learned that open communication is critical to maintaining long-term relationships.
I’ve also learned that managing complex video production projects and directing video producers is well outside my area of expertise, regardless of what I may have believed when I started this project. For these shortcomings and my inability to recognize them when I asked you to back Learn to Packraft, I apologize for misleading you about what we promised we could accomplish with this project.
Best Regards,
Ryan Jordan
Publisher, Backpacking Light
publisher@backpackinglight.com
Gear Review: the Durston Kakwa 40 backpack utilizes an inverted U-shaped internal frame for stability and comfort at moderate loads. But how does it fare at heavier weights?
Observing a lunar phenomenon in an otherworldly landscape provides a sense of awe distinct from typical backpacking trips
Other than a thin sliver of Yellowstone National Park, Idaho doesn’t have any national parks proper despite having an abundance of outrageously beautiful landscapes. Instead, Idaho’s public lands are state parks, designated Wilderness areas, Wild and Scenic rivers, or vast swaths of National Forest or BLM high desert.
While many of these fall into the usual categories of majestic mountains, whitewater rivers, or dense forests, there is one landscape – Craters of the Moon National Monument – that is unlike anywhere else I’ve ever backpacked. For a short shoulder-season trip, it’s an ideal destination.
Backpacking in the Craters of the Moon Wilderness starts off with a heavy pack full of water, but is always worth the effort. Clear skies and an otherworldly landscape – which you often have entirely to yourself – more than make up for the lack of water and limited trail infrastructure.
I’ve never felt like I needed an excuse or permission to revisit an area. So when my girlfriend and I realized on our first visit to Craters of the Moon last year that there would be a lunar eclipse the following May (and on her birthday, no less), we knew we had to plan a trip around it.
Idaho also has some of the darkest skies in the continental United States, especially so at Craters of the Moon. The opportunity to experience a lunar eclipse in a designated dark sky park, in a surreal landscape with moon-like features, was just too perfect.
From my house in Montana’s Bitterroot Valley, the 263-mile drive to Craters of the Moon has exactly three stop lights.
The route passes by Idaho’s tallest peak and the stark and intimidating Lost River Range. But more alluringly to a hot springs enthusiast like myself, it passes by several hot springs. One of my favorite of these is a small pool between the highway and the river – a perfect roadside pit stop. I can think of few better ways to break up a drive on a backpacking trip than by a soak in a beautiful river canyon.
A small hot spring is an excellent way to break up the drive.
Just as the Lost River Range begins to fade away over the horizon, those wishing to visit Craters of the Moon head west. Before long, what looks to be fairly typical high desert fields turn into lava flats, and the vastness of the landscape becomes visceral. When exploring the trails in the National Monument, that feeling reaches new heights.
The brutal climate of Craters of the Moon – hot, dry, windy summers and bitterly cold and windy winters – means that the window for backpacking there is mostly confined to spring and fall. Given that there is no reliable surface water in the areas of the monument most attractive to backpacking, it’s not surprising that few backpackers visit Craters of the Moon. It’s far from most other attractions in Idaho, and the state has no shortage of world-class backpacking trips.
Lacking the recreation pressure that can only be managed by reservation systems and quotas, Craters of the Moon only requires a free permit that can be picked up at the visitor center by backpackers wishing to spend the night in the 43,243-acre wilderness.
The land managers recommend visitors camp in Echo Crater to limit the impact on the landscape by concentrating use. Reached by an approximately four-mile hike, with the last stretch of that cross-country through sagebrush plains, the crater makes for one of the most incredible campsites I’ve ever stayed at.
This campsite, tucked into a stand of limber pine inside a crater, is one of the most surreal I’ve stayed in over a decade of backpacking. The views from the crater’s rim are spectacular and look out over lava flats and toward distant snowcapped mountains.
After meandering through the sagebrush, you reach the lower rim of the crater and then descend into it to reach two distinct camping areas. You’re mercifully out of the worst of the winds that whip across the lava fields in the craters, and the lowermost campsite is tucked into a charming grove of limber pine.
Cliffs tower above, with colorful lichen contrasting the more drab colors that define the crater’s interior. Exiting the crater provides those camped there with the novel sensation of hiking out of a basement to reach the ground level of the lava fields. But perhaps the most lovely thing about camping at Echo Crater is walking along the rim of the crater, peering down at your campsite and out to distant mountain ranges and the scattered craters and cinder cones and buttes of the monument. You can walk all the way around the rim if you chose (and why wouldn’t you?).
Knowing the terrific view that the crater’s rim afforded, Andrea and I decided that witnessing the lunar eclipse – a Super Flower Blood Moon, to be precise – from that vantage point would be a sublime backcountry experience. And apparently, we were alone in that estimation because on the evening of Sunday, May 15th, we had the crater to ourselves. The ranger who issued our permit told us we were the only backpackers camped in the entire National Monument that night.
Despite being only four miles from the trailhead, the austerity and vastness of the landscape – as well as the cross-country travel required to reach our campsite – gave this overnight trip a much more adventurous feel than might be expected.
Although some cloud cover had drifted into the region, and it would briefly rain on us during the night, our view to the southeast, where the moon would rise, was completely unobstructed. We enjoyed our dinner and brewed up some tea to sip on while we waited for the main event when the moon would pass into the earth’s shadow.
Seeing the lunar eclipse in progress while sitting atop a crater in Craters of the Moon National Monument was one of the most sublime natural wonders I’ve experienced as a backpacker.
Looking out over the lava fields and towards another crater, we saw the moon rise, and then a subtle smudge appear on its bottom. We monitored the progress with binoculars and marveled at the detail we could see on the moon as the eclipse slowly began to take place. The amount of ambient light made the event all the more enjoyable, as the soft green of spring was present in the sparse vegetation, the tiny rocks in the crater had a deep red tint to them, and the blues of the sky added a calming tone to it all.
Once the moon was entirely within the earth’s shadow, we looked at it again with binoculars and were astounded to see just how close the stars appeared to the moon itself. The usual light of the full moon washes these out, but during the eclipse, we could see and appreciate these stars, marveling at the fact that they’re always there but just not visible.
Distant snowcapped mountains provide a contrast to the arid and flat lava plains of Craters of the Moon National Monument.
This experience was one of the most incredible I’ve ever had as a backpacker – a lunar eclipse is amazing enough; pairing it with an otherworldly landscape took it to another level. When planning my trips, I try to target complementary seasons for the landscapes (i.e., not visiting Death Valley in August), but this was my first real foray into planning for celestial events.
Return for another adventure in Craters of the Moon National Monument with this article by David Chenault.
Read another tale of backpacking and lunar eclipse here.
Browse more Places content for tales of adventure and inspiration.
DISCLOSURE (Updated April 9, 2024)
Backpacking Light does not accept compensation or donated/discounted products in exchange for product mentions or placements in editorial coverage.
Some (but not all) of the links in this review may be affiliate links. If you click on one of these links and visit one of our affiliate partners (usually a retailer site), and subsequently place an order with that retailer, we receive a commission on your entire order, which varies between 3% and 15% of the purchase price. Affiliate commissions represent less than 15% of Backpacking Light's gross revenue. More than 70% of our revenue comes from Membership Fees. So if you'd really like to support our work, don't buy gear you don't need - support our consumer advocacy work and become a Member instead.
Learn more about affiliate commissions, influencer marketing, and our consumer advocacy work by reading our article Stop wasting money on gear.
In this episode, Ryan and Andrew discuss some small, pocket-sized cameras for backpacking.
Listen
Listen to the podcast on Itunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Summary
In this skills short episode of the Backpacking Light podcast, Ryan and Andrew discuss ultralight cameras for backpacking. Today’s episode is very focused and short – just a quick list of a few lightweight cameras for backpacking that we’ve liked and used to get good results with backcountry photography.
Outline
0:00:00 – podcast intro; Categories of small cameras
0:01:56 – latest model smartphones
0:06:02 – mid-sensor compact cameras
0:08:39 – rugged compact cameras
0:11:57 – action Cameras and the GoPro Camera
0:14:43 – final thoughts: “The best camera is the camera you have with you and ready.”
Executive Producer - Backpacking Light; Show Director and Host - Ryan Jordan; Producer - Chase Jordan; Theme music: Look for Me in the Mountains written by Chris Cunningham and Ryan Jordan, performed by Chris Cunningham (acoustic guitar, lead and harmony vocals, harmonica), Chad Langford (upright bass), and Tom Murphy (mandolin), produced by Basecamp Studios in Bozeman, Montana.
Sponsorship Policy: Backpacking Light does not accept compensation or donated/discounted products in exchange for product mentions or placements in editorial coverage, including any podcast episode content not excplicitly identified as sponsored content. Some (but not all) of the links in these show notes may be affiliate links. Learn more about affiliate commissions, influencer marketing, and our consumer advocacy work by reading our article Stop wasting money on gear.
Can an ancient Roman philosophy make you a better backpacker? It all depends upon your application.
This is part two of Andrew Marshall’s ongoing series examining the intersection between backpacking and ancient ways of thinking. Read part one here.
My long-time hiking partner and I have a Stoic-themed running joke that we break out on every backpacking trip. And if you think that’s the nerdiest thing you’ll read on Backpacking Light this week, you haven’t been around this website very long.
The joke normally happens when something particularly miserable is going on – let’s say we’re entering hour ten of a rainstorm, and the temperature drops down into the low forties.
The joke goes like this.
Q: “How would Marcus Aurelius handle this situation?”
A: “He’d probably say, ‘get me out of this rainstorm, you assholes. I’m the most powerful man in the known world!’”
Like all the best jokes, this one requires a detailed explanation, a passing familiarity with western philosophy, and an interest in the history of post-republic Rome.
A brief primer on Richard Harris, I mean, Marcus Aurelius
See, Marcus Aurelius had a lot to say about bearing up under hardship and living a simple, austere existence that revolves around controlling one’s reactions to external circumstances. He is responsible for Meditations – a tome that, along with works by playwright Seneca the Younger and slave-turned-philosopher Epictetus, form the backbone of the Roman philosophy of Stoicism.
What’s funny about that – at least to me, especially if I’m being rained on – is that at the same time that Marcus Aurelius was writing lines like “our life is what our thoughts make it,” he was the Emperor of Rome during one of its high water marks. In his lifetime, he was arguably the most powerful person in all of Europe, Central Asia, and northern Africa. If there was any man alive at the time who could make his world reflect his thoughts, it was Marcus Aurelius.
So it’s inherently humorous to me to read a Marcus tidbit like, “There is never any need to get worked up or to trouble your soul about things you can’t control,” because the list of things the Emperor of Rome couldn’t control at that time was probably vanishingly small, at least compared to most other human beings alive at the time.
To be fair to Marcus, the writings that makes up Meditations were his personal journals and were probably designed to help him remember that even though he was the Emperor of Rome, he shouldn’t necessarily live or act like it.
And by all accounts, it worked. Stoicism didn’t help Marcus avoid the trap of nepotism or raise a decent son – Commodus was famously a nutbar, and yes he really did fight in the Colosseum for fun. But the philosophy did seem to keep Marcus from winding up as a murderous, spoiled lunatic, and that fact alone puts him in the top ten of all absolute monarchs, if not the top three. Quite an accomplishment, really.
All of which is to say – in a roundabout way I can get away with because I’m the editor around here – Stoicism can be a helpful mindset for ultralight backpackers.
This situation has a lot of factors that Stoicism can help parse.
Some things that look great as a refrigerator magnet
Consider this from Epictetus: “The chief task in life is simply this: to identify and separate matters so that I can say clearly to myself which are externals not under my control, and which have to do with the choices I actually control. Where then do I look for good and evil? Not to uncontrollable externals, but within myself to the choices that are my own…”
Okay, so this is pretty basic stuff, right? I mean, really, most philosophy and religion are made up of the same seven good ideas, and this is one of them. I’m sure you’ve heard a variation of it. Stoicism is filled with things like this:
“We are often more frightened than hurt; we suffer more from imagination than from reality.” — Seneca
“You become what you give your attention to… if you yourself don’t choose what thoughts and images you expose yourself to, someone else will.” —Epictetus
“Today, I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions, not outside.” — Marcus Aurelius
Not every backpacking trip is this idyllic. Applying Stoic exercises to planning, decision-making, and training can be helpful.
I have a lot of love for pithy little sayings like this. It’s one of the things that makes Stoicism such a lasting and accessible mindset and one of the reasons people like Ryan Holiday can make a whole career out of talking about it. It sounds good. It looks good as a tattoo.
But just like the Bible verses from my youth, I have trouble transforming lines like this into a usable mindset. I am, as I’ve written several times in this space, simply too chemically unbalanced to “discard my anxiety” in ultralight backpacking or life in general.
But Stoicism also comes with a few thought exercises – sort of summations or generalizations of all the ideas in the texts distilled into practices – and these I do find handy, especially in the context of outdoor, human-powered adventure. Here are a few I find useful for backpacking. Bonus points – some of them are in Latin, which makes them sound extra cool.
Memento Mori
I’m fascinated by risk assessment, particularly as I now have a 37-year-old, fully functioning pre-frontal cortex and am (I think?) well past my days of doing stupid things to impress pretty girls.
I’m struck by all the times I see people – people who should know better – doing dumb things in the outdoors. Don’t you know people who push over high passes with thunderstorms looming? People who’d rather play the odds against water-born pathogens than spend a few ounces of pack weight and a few minutes of trail time carrying and using a water treatment system? People who walk too close to rattlesnakes, set up shelters in flood zones, or hop casually across precarious Jenga nightmares of talus and scree?
I sure do. Often it’s people who don’t know any better – raw beginners.
And just as often, it’s people who should know better because they have a moderate-to-decent amount of skill and experience. But the problem with people with some skills and experience is that they often overrate those skills and experience – a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect.
A related phenomenon is the thinking that “my reckless behavior has so far not caused any harm; therefore, it will continue not causing any harm.” This cognitive bias is called the Normalcy Bias. If you are pretty sure neither of these biases applies to you, they probably apply especially to you.
Just around this bend, an out-of-season snowstorm blanketed a steep, exposed ridge with a foot of snow. Lacking microspikes or ice axes, my wife and I turned around, despite having looked forward to this trip for months. Memento Mori.
The city of Rome used to throw triumphs for victorious generals. Imagine a Super Bowl parade where the losing team has to march in chains ahead of the victorious team’s coach. That’s the general vibe.
Triumphs were huge, career-making deals. Once in a lifetime events (well, until Pompey the Great, but that’s a different story). Anyway, triumphs could inflate the ego a bit. That’s why, as the victorious general proceeded through Rome in his bedazzled chariot, a slave would whisper in his ear, over and over again, “Memento mori.”
Remember, you are mortal.
Find a hiking partner who will do the same for you. If you are the type of person who looks at a gathering thunderhead and says, “yeah, we can make it over the pass if we hurry,” you should be backpacking with someone who takes the opposite approach.
Your loved ones will thank you for it.
Premeditatio Malorum
There’s a good Stoic exercise for decision-making. It involves thinking through a scenario and imagining the worst – the very absolute worst – thing that is likely to happen and then imagining what you would do in response to that thing. Often, rather than increase my anxiety about a decision, this process decreases it because, in my head, I have faced the worst-case scenario and determined that I will most likely still be 1) alive and 2) mostly unscathed at the end of it.
Premeditatio Malorum – the pre-meditation of evils – is powerful in day-to-day life, where the worst-case scenarios are somewhere between “I’ll lose my job,” and “my cat will be irritated with me.” By realizing that the worst thing that will happen is usually not all that bad, one can make decisions one might otherwise be too hesitant to make. It’s a way of overcoming uncertainty.
The only water source for 40 miles in any direction on a multi-day backpacking trip in the Gila Wilderness of southern New Mexico. Applying premeditatio malorum helped me think through if it would be better to risk getting water from this source than it would be to travel those 40 miles with only two liters of clean water.
In human-powered adventure, the stakes are often higher, so Premeditatio Malorum must be practiced with care and often serves to discourage, rather than encourage, certain decisions.
In fact, Memento Mori and Premeditatio Malorum should be held in the mind side by side. Remember you are mortal – and do so by realizing that in many backpacking scenarios, the absolute worst decisions can lead to injury or death. Make decisions as if this is the case.
I thought about this concept a lot during the last few years as various phases of the pandemic affected the backpacking-related decisions I made. When the non-profits that manage the big three National Scenic Trails (Appalachian Trail, Continental Divide Trail, and Pacific Crest Trail) recommended postponing or canceling thru-hikes in the spring of 2020, many prospective hikers kicked up a fuss. “Why,” the question went, “would I worry about Covid-19 when I’m going to be hiking in the woods the whole time?”
This mindset reflects a lack of Premeditatio Malorum, which forces the thinker to work through a full set of scenarios to arrive at an outcome. Applying Premeditatio Malorum reveals a worst-case scenario in which a Covid-19 infected hiker might spread the disease through the small trail towns, hostels, and resupply points that form the spine of life on a long-distance trail. Many of these towns have disproportionally elderly populations, and many are hours away from the nearest hospital with a ventilator.
After spending some time imagining how I might react to being the cause of such a disastrous ripple effect, I had no issues changing my plans in 2020.
I find shorter backpacking trips difficult to fully immerse myself in. It takes me a while to unwind, to get used to sleeping on the ground again, to get into the rhythm of things. With a shorter trip, I’m just getting there before it’s time to head home.
Sometimes you keep your last pair of dry socks dry all day and then step into the water accidentally when crossing a creek. Love Fate.
Longer trips allow me to embrace Amor Fati – love of fate. On short trips, it’s easy to suffer a bit and then question why I’m out there, daydreaming of pizza and a warm bed when I could be eating pizza and sleeping in a warm bed. But on long trips, I can flip my brain into viewing each negative circumstance – too cold, too hot, too tired, blisters, insect bites, poor sleep – into something that is, if not intrinsically good, at least necessary.
Perhaps a backpacker with a stronger will than I can make this flip more quickly or smoothly than I can. But for me, I appreciate that long trips force me to embrace – to love – that wet is wet, cold is cold, hot is hot, and steep is steep.
Practicing misfortune is a concept that comes straight from Seneca and is most useful when it comes to training for backpacking (or anything else really). What it boils down to is this – train outside on crappy days.
Even more so, train harder, for longer, at a greater intensity, on crappy days. Get rained on, or posthole, or get parched in the heat. Sleep on the floor of your bedroom every now and then. Turn your AC off. Don’t eat for a day. Take cold showers. Leave the umbrella at home on a rainy day.
The idea is that when you practice misfortune, normal life difficulties – or difficult circumstances while backpacking – seem easier by comparison.
Note the fresh snow on the car in the background. Not ideal conditions for a training hike in summer trail runners. And that was precisely the point. Practice misfortune.
This is a somewhat obvious concept and will likely cause a few eye rolls (duh, right?) but I’d bet that it is difficult for many to put into practice. I know it is for me. I’m pretty good at finding a reason not to go on a run in 40-degree, freezing rain conditions. I can always find an excuse not sleeping on the ground. I do enjoy my comforts.
Practicing Misfortune can be extended beyond training for trips to encompass the trips themselves. The hardest trip I ever took was 170 miles in six days, and 100 miles of that was post-holing, stumbling over suncups, and route-finding over blinding, icy slush. I won’t call this trip fun, but I undertook it because I had a guiding trip coming up later in the year, and I wanted my brain on that trip to be thinking, “hey, this is easy,” even when it wasn’t.
Another way of thinking about all this? Everything is training for something.
Embrace what works, discard the rest
For me, it takes a conscious, sustained effort to Practice Misfortune. In fact, it takes real effort to undertake any of these exercises – which is pretty much the whole point, actually.
Stoicism is about thinking – living – intentionally. Not being carried along and pushed from one thought and emotion to the next and reacting thoughtlessly to each in turn, but instead choosing a response to each circumstance.
That idea as a whole can be applied to ultralight backpacking pretty broadly, as I hope my examples have demonstrated. But there’s no need to embrace the entire philosophy if it doesn’t work for you. I have no interest in pointing you towards either a trendy lifestyle or a set of trendy lifestyle coaches (I am terminally skeptical of both).
Feel free to pick and choose concepts and techniques that seem effective and cheerfully ignore the rest. This, after all, is the beauty of ultralight backpacking as a philosophy. The best aspects of it are the ones that work for you.
Backpacking Light does not accept compensation or donated/discounted products in exchange for product mentions or placements in editorial coverage.
Some (but not all) of the links in this review may be affiliate links. If you click on one of these links and visit one of our affiliate partners (usually a retailer site), and subsequently place an order with that retailer, we receive a commission on your entire order, which varies between 3% and 15% of the purchase price. Affiliate commissions represent less than 15% of Backpacking Light's gross revenue. More than 70% of our revenue comes from Membership Fees. So if you'd really like to support our work, don't buy gear you don't need - support our consumer advocacy work and become a Member instead.
Learn more about affiliate commissions, influencer marketing, and our consumer advocacy work by reading our article Stop wasting money on gear.
Best practices for storing your freeze-dried food (plus one killer chiles rellenos recipe).
In previous installments in this series, we’ve talked about the hows and whys of freeze-drying food for backpacking. With a consumer-oriented freeze-dryer like the Harvest Right, the hows are pretty simple: push a couple of buttons and walk away. The whys we have covered in a bit more detail: freeze-dried food is much lighter without all that water weight, and it retains its flavor and nutrition.
But there is one more why to cover: freeze-dried food keeps for a long time. Mountain House claims that its products have a shelf-life of over 30 years. It is unlikely that backpackers freeze-drying foods at home can obtain multi-decade shelf lives. It is also unlikely that we would want or need to do so. After all, we are preparing for hiking trips, not the end times. For our purposes, we want to keep our food flavorful and nutritious for several months or maybe a couple of years. This article will outline the best practices that will let you do that. We’ll start by talking about what causes food to go bad.
In our Archives: Catch up on the rest of Drew’s freeze-drying articles here:
Moisture, heat, and oxygen are the key contributors to food decay. This is just as true for storage as it is in the initial freeze-drying process. Light can also cause the breakdown of some vitamins and flavor molecules (which, as you recall, have similar chemistries). Minimizing food exposure to these factors is the key to retaining food quality.
Temperature
The rate of chemical reactions (with some non-entropic exceptions) usually increases with increases in temperature. A food degradation reaction is the very definition of an entropic process, and so this rule holds for loss of food quality. We all know this – it is why we have refrigerators. But what may not be so obvious is how a few degrees of temperature can make a substantial difference in shelf life.
Different food molecules have different temperature-dependent rates of decay, but a good rule of thumb for biochemical reactions is that rates double with every 18 °F (10 °C) increase in temperature. The upshot of this temperature dependence is that storing your dried food in a spot that is 8 °F (5 °C) cooler will increase shelf life by about 1.4 times. Finding a spot that is 18 °F (10 °C) cooler will double your shelf life.
Moisture
Water is the universal solvent and will eventually break down just about every kind of food molecule. Degradative enzymes present in foods will accelerate this process. Freeze-drying removes >95% of food water, and you want to keep it this way. Storing your food in moisture-impermeable containers (more on this below) is essential, especially if you live in a humid region.
Oxygen
Oxygen strips the electrons from nutrient and flavor molecules, which happen to mostly be electron-rich. You want to keep oxygen away from your stored food, maybe even more than you want to keep water out.
In Our Forums: Check out what the Backpacking Light membership is talking about with regard to food:
How to store your freeze-dried food: keep it flavorful and nutritious
Let’s start with what doesn’t work: storing food in freezer bags. These are made of linear low-density polyethylene (LDPE), and this type of plastic is highly permeable to oxygen and moderately permeable to moisture. They are fine for storing your food for a few days or even weeks, but you will be disappointed if you keep dried food in them for longer than that.
Your best options for storing freeze-dried foods are mylar bags or glass jars. There are metal can systems available, but once opened, they are not readily resealable and so are best suited for multi-year storage.
This food will still be good when future me is ready to head out for a hike.
Mylar bags are made of polyester terephthalate (PET), which is approximately 60-fold less permeable to oxygen than a low-density polyethylene film of the same thickness. PET has the same moisture permeability as LDPE, so mylar food storage bags are typically coated with a metallic film. Metalized mylar is nearly 300-fold less permeable to oxygen than uncoated mylar, and moisture permeability is reduced more than 40-fold.
The permeabilities of plastics are inversely proportional to their thickness, and so a 7-mil bag will be less than half as permeable as a 3-mil bag. But given the effectiveness of metallization, the additional reduction in permeability due to plastic thickness is probably superfluous except for very long-term storage. Metalized 3-mil bags should work well enough.
Glass canning jars (Mason jars) are completely impermeable to oxygen and moisture when properly sealed. I have used these jars extensively for storing heat-dehydrated foods. Paired with a vacuum attachment, they keep dried food fresh for months to years.
However, they do not work so well for storing freeze-dried food. The problem is not performance, it’s bulkiness. Unlike dehydrated foods, freeze-dried foods don’t collapse and therefore stay at their original volume. Where I could fit slices from a dozen dehydrated peaches in a single quart jar, I needed three to four jars to store the same amount of freeze-dried peaches. Already faced with wifely complaints about the amount of pantry space taken up by backpacking food, I’ve been using resealable mylar bags for freeze-dried food. I can stuff these discretely in closets and corners and never have to hear a word about the pantry.
Mylar bags keep oxygen out, but you also need to get rid of the oxygen already inside the bag. Heat-sealable mylar vacuum bags are available. Their drawback is that you cannot reseal them more than once or twice. Rather than evacuate oxygen, I instead deplete it with oxygen-absorbing packets. These are basically packets of iron filings that absorb oxygen by rusting. A 100cc packet is generally adequate for a quart storage bag. These packets enable long-term storage in zip-seal mylar bags. And because zip-seal bags can be reused many times, they reduce your contribution to the plastic waste stream.
An online search for mylar bags and oxygen absorbers will yield dozens of hits, all with very similar-sounding products. I haven’t done any comparison testing of different bags or absorbers, so my advice is generic: don’t buy the cheapest product; that rarely works out well.
In summary, here is what has been working for me:
Put food in a zip-seal mylar bag.
Add one to two oxygen-absorber packets.
Squeeze out the excess air.
Zip seal.
Store in a cool place until it is time to hit the trail.
Recipe: freeze-dried chiles rellenos
Along with tomatoes, peppers are a food that is far better home-grown than store-bought. There is perhaps no finer aroma in the world than the smell of fresh-roasted chile peppers. When harvest time comes around, we enjoy roasted peppers in various meals a couple of times a week, and their flavor never wears out its welcome.
Stuffed roasted peppers (chiles rellenos) are a true measure of any Mexican restaurant and one of my favorite dishes of all time. Enjoying them on the trail would be the fulfillment of a dream
Rellenos are structurally complicated, and so are a demanding test of a freeze-dryer. It’s not that they would taste terrible if they came out in a hash, but they would not be as fun. And we are all about the fun here at Backpacking Light.
To roast the peppers:
Put them on a grill at medium heat (350 °F).
Heat them until they begin to blister (about 5 minutes) and then turn frequently. You don’t want them blackened, just browned.
Put the peppers in a bowl, cover with a dish towel and let them cool off, about 20 minutes.
Peel off the blistered skins.
You then want to remove the seeds. The easiest way is to cut off the top, remove the placenta, and then ream out the remaining seeds with a knife.
Fresh-roasted peppers ready to stuff.
Classic chiles rellenos are then stuffed, dipped in batter, and fried in oil or poached in sauce. I didn’t think this would turn out well for freeze-drying, and also, it’s a lot of work. Instead, I just stuffed them – you still get all the roasted pepper flavor this way.
The principal ingredient of the stuffing is cheese. You can add whatever other embellishments suit your taste. For this batch, I mixed cheese with fresh-roasted corn and a bit of mayonnaise as a binder. I tried both stuffing from the open top, and also slitting the sides. I carefully cut the top-stuffed peppers into sections, thinking that the smaller chunks would better survive a few days in a backpack. Both methods seemed to freeze-dry up just fine.
Ready to roll.
For trail testing, I packed the peppers along with some freeze-dried rice and homemade freeze-dried tomato sauce with a bit of Mexican oregano sprinkled in. They were still intact after a couple of days on the trail.
Ready for the big test Photo credit: Chris Lundy
Not wanting the peppers to get mangled and mushy, I removed them before adding hot water to the rice and tomato sauce. I let these rehydrate for a few minutes, added the peppers, mixed gently, and let sit for another five minutes.
Rehydrating the rice and sauce.
The results? I’d be lying if I said it was as good as fresh picked and roasted peppers. But it was pretty darn good. Especially when washed down by a beer I had stashed in my water cache. A lonesome trail, hot chiles rellenos, and a cold (well ok, slightly cool) beer – hiking doesn’t get much better than that.
Living large in the Valjean Valley of the Mojave Desert.
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Andrew and Ryan chat with She Summits Co. founder and director Amanda Hatley.
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Listen to the podcast on Itunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Summary
In this episode of the Backpacking Light Podcast, Andrew and Ryan chat with She Summits Co. founder and director Amanda Hatley. She Summits is a female-owned and female-led adventure camp that empowers young women through outdoor experiences like backpacking, kayaking, and climbing.
In the extended Members Only version of this episode – the full interview with Amanda Hatley, the Tarptent Dipole Li, Bedrock Sandals Cairn Adventure Sandals, Scarpa Ribelle Shoes, and new educational opportunities at Backpacking Light.
Outline
0:00:30 – Introduction & Podcast Overview
0:00:59 – Ryan Jordan backpacking with friends (and his kids!) in Colorado’s Flat Tops Wilderness Area
0:06:14 – The Scarpa Ribella Shoe
0:08:25 – Ryan’s and Andrew’s thoughts on the Tarptent DiPole Lithium
0:11:21 – Thoughts on the Bedrock Cairn Sandals
0:15:12 – Interview with Amanda Hatley; What is She Summits and how did it start?
0:24:34 – What does She Summits do?
0:33:35 – The core skills taught at She Summits
0:34:43 – How She Summits develop their curriculum, especially in regards to balancing hard skills and soft skills?
0:41:16 – Bravery and societal expectations on and values about young women
0:44:04 – Thoughts on inclusivity in the outdoor industry and on the hiring of guides
0:56:26 – Advice for women (and anyone) who are hoping to get into the world of backpacking whether as a career, hobby, or otherwise: Have a trip plan.
1:03:51 – Bucket list adventures
1:04:25 – The allure and potential challenges of international travel
1:10:12 – Interview wrap up
1:12:13 – The upcoming Women’s Backpacking and Map & Compass Courses at Backpacking Light
Executive Producer - Backpacking Light; Show Director and Host - Ryan Jordan; Producer - Chase Jordan; Theme music: Look for Me in the Mountains written by Chris Cunningham and Ryan Jordan, performed by Chris Cunningham (acoustic guitar, lead and harmony vocals, harmonica), Chad Langford (upright bass), and Tom Murphy (mandolin), produced by Basecamp Studios in Bozeman, Montana.
Sponsorship Policy: Backpacking Light does not accept compensation or donated/discounted products in exchange for product mentions or placements in editorial coverage, including any podcast episode content not excplicitly identified as sponsored content. Some (but not all) of the links in these show notes may be affiliate links. Learn more about affiliate commissions, influencer marketing, and our consumer advocacy work by reading our article Stop wasting money on gear.
Maybe not everything about ultralight backpacking has to be optimized.
When my partner Hallie and I tried to embark on a trip to the far southwestern corner of Utah last month, I was no help at all. She would have been happy to explore almost anything, walking through any mountain range just to see what’s there, tromping off-trail between junipers, and climbing loose shaley hills to get a view of who-knows-what. But every place, to me, had an issue I couldn’t reconcile. Every place was imperfect. Or maybe not every place, but every imagined future experience in a place.
Anticipating a winter rain can be anxiety-inducing, but just experiencing it can be beautiful.
The Beaver Dam Mountains looked intriguing from St. George, Utah. They weren’t tall or jagged, but they were a place I hadn’t been. And sometimes that’s enough for me. This time, it was more than enough for Hallie, who was elated by the prospect of just being outside, cold and windy though it was. I looked down at the map and then out a window but understood neither landscape, projected or real, well enough to say, “Yes! Let’s do that!”
I felt paralyzed, and Hallie was at a loss as to how to revive me.
Hallie, happy to be hiking in shorts in the winter.
For one, I told her, the storms were building somewhere in the mysterious west, or at least the weather app on my phone said that was the case. That somewhere in the center of the Pacific some future desert wind, some future slickrock snow was growing, building. We had considered a packrafting loop through the reemerging Glen Canyon too, but when I imagined being on the freezing water in 20 mph winds, I got nervous and closed the CalTopo app.
I didn’t want to sit with the reality that I couldn’t control the outcome of a trip.
Of course, this is why I plan. Because the world is completely unpredictable. All futures are unknown. This is why I make spreadsheets with every piece of gear laid out before me with weights and uses clearly labeled. So I know that I can respond to rain, snow, heat, cold, darkness, and bears. Frankly, this is also why I so often overpack (I’m not the best ultralight backpacker sometimes).
All of these efforts stem from a fear of the unknown, which is an ambiguous way of saying that I’m scared of dying. They are manifestations of the desire to optimize fear out of the backpacking equation. Of course, this is an absurd attempt. It’s impossible to optimize fear out of the equation in either backpacking or human life. But the closer I get, Oliver Burkeman tells me in his book 4,000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, the more possible it sometimes seems. But this is a trap.
It’s a trap because it’s just never going to happen. There’s always going to be uncertainty. “Entering space and time… means letting your illusions die,” Burkeman writes. In other words, as long as you have been born – everyone reading this has – you will have to let visions of the perfect future die. So no trip is going to be perfect, ever. No reality will map onto the plan in my mind, ever. And no life will be as fulfilling as I’d hope, ever. I’ll never get to a place where I am prepared to have a child, and I’m never going to get to a place where I am prepared for everything the wilderness will throw at me.
But I can worry about it. And worry, Burkeman tells me, is an effort to assert control over the future. So, as I sat looking out the window, I worried because that felt somehow easier than sitting with the reality that I couldn’t know what any potential trip might hold.
So much of the online backpacking world today is fixated on optimization for the purpose of addressing every possible future scenario. We’re also fixated on optimizing for the lowest possible weight, the most calories per ounce, and the most warmth for weight. This is all pretty funny to me because backpacking, at its core, is kind of a pointless activity. And that pointlessness is the point. Or at least used to be. In fact, hiking is one of Oliver Burkeman’s favorite hobbies, and he writes about it in the chapter “Hiking as an End in Itself.” On a rainy walk through the high moors of the Yorkshire Dales he reflects that his leisurely country walk has two noteworthy features:
“For one thing, unlike almost everything else I do with my life, it’s not relevant to ask whether I’m any good at it: all I’m doing is walking, a skill at which I haven’t appreciably improved since around the age of four. Moreover, a country walk doesn’t have a purpose, in the sense of an outcome you’re trying to achieve or somewhere you’re trying to get…On a hike, you either follow a loop or reach a given point before turning back, so the most efficient way to reach the endpoint would be never to leave in the first place.” – Oliver Burkeman
Walking, then, is an “atelic activity,” or a pursuit with no ultimate goal or telos. Telos is the root of the term teleology, which is the idea everything has an intrinsic purpose. Aristotle – who effed things up royally in my opinion and in whose writing the idea of teleology originated – would probably question Burkeman’s view of walking.
And I can see the appeal of teleology; it orders and simplifies the world, but the world resists the idea if you really look. Just a few nights backpacking through the wilderness will remind you that the world is fundamentally random, chaotic, purposeless, uncaring, non-hierarchical, and fleeting. And then you die. It’s tempting to want to look for meaning in it, to control it. And I do – we do – all the time. But I can see that it doesn’t serve me.
So what the hell am I doing trying to reinsert purpose into a purposeless activity by worrying about the perfect experience? Why can’t I just sit with the reality that I can’t control the future or the desert or the mountains?
Well, Burkeman says, because we all do everything we can to avoid reality pretty much all the time.
To both distract from and attempt to assert control over reality, I optimize my kit, my plan, and my skills. And it works to some degree. Optimization can also be important for safety and to have a fun trip too. But it’s not lost on me that much of this effort is just a stand-in for the fact that it’s impossible to address the larger unknowns that I can’t optimize my way out of. Like death.
And that’s what this all really boils down to. We only have so much time (4,000 weeks for the average human life, actually) and we want to make sure we make good use of it. Unfortunately – and this is the really annoying kicker – we won’t. No one will ever do everything they hope to do. I’d like to visit Japan and New Zealand, but it might not happen before I kick the bucket. And that just sucks.
But the neurosis stemming from this fear is easiest to see in my hobby of backpacking because it is a problem-solving wellspring. There are endless ways for me to avoid the fact that I will never have a perfect kit by incrementally improving it. And I can avoid the fact that most trips will be imperfect and unpredictable by reducing the possibility of surprise by going out only during good weather windows while carrying a GPS app with the route clearly marked. And for each of my accomplishments, whether it’s the acquisition of the perfect 20-degree quilt or the bagging of a peak, “it’s always the case either that you haven’t achieved it yet (so you’re dissatisfied, because you don’t yet have what you desire) or that you’ve already attained it (so you’re dissatisfied, because you no longer have it as something to strive toward),” Burkeman writes. Sound familiar?
Finally, Hallie and I made a choice that was in no way perfect, but at least it was a choice. We chose a Wilderness Area in northern Arizona where neither of us had been. We crossed an Interstate on foot, removed our shoes and crossed a muddy river, and then worked our way up a widening, deepening, cobblestone canyon towards who-knows-where. It took a long time to get halfway to a water source, and there we stopped, right in the middle of the 12-mile-long gorge. As we stood there in the middle, I realized that it felt good simply to have made a choice and to have begun walking.
Looking up-canyon toward the water source we never found.
This canyon was the type of place where I wouldn’t be able to live if I didn’t have food, water, and shelter on my back. This means it was also precisely the sort of place I had feared when I was letting my neurotic, control-freak side get the better of me back at the house. A place that, I thought, wanted to kill me. But instead of futilely worrying about all that could go wrong in this unforgiving desert, I sat with the wild possibility that I could trust myself to adapt to whatever I may encounter. As that thought steeped in my stubborn mind, the landscape around me started to come into focus, to become more real.
At each end of the canyon, rain swept toward the ground in slow ghostly curtains. The cobblestones under my feet ground against one another as I shifted my weight. My hands were cold. I was starting to see, hear, feel. Then my fantasy of complete control over the future started, haltingly and with resistance, to fall away. Like Dylan, “I opened my heart to the world and the world came in.”
Looking down-canyon toward the winter storm.
When you let your illusions die, accepting no trip will be perfect and no kit will anticipate every problem while also weighing under six pounds – when you accept that your precious time allotted for trips may never be fully optimized, “you get to actually be here.” says Burkeman. “You get to have some real purchase on life. You get to spend your finite time focused on a few things that matter to you, in themselves, right now, in this moment.”
I started to focus on what mattered, and what mattered was the place and my body in it. I began to extricate myself from the false reasons for backpacking: kit improvement, trip time-window optimization, flawless preparation. I started to return to the real point of backpacking, its utter pointlessness, and just how enjoyable that can be.
Backpacking Light does not accept compensation or donated/discounted products in exchange for product mentions or placements in editorial coverage.
Some (but not all) of the links in this review may be affiliate links. If you click on one of these links and visit one of our affiliate partners (usually a retailer site), and subsequently place an order with that retailer, we receive a commission on your entire order, which varies between 3% and 15% of the purchase price. Affiliate commissions represent less than 15% of Backpacking Light's gross revenue. More than 70% of our revenue comes from Membership Fees. So if you'd really like to support our work, don't buy gear you don't need - support our consumer advocacy work and become a Member instead.
Learn more about affiliate commissions, influencer marketing, and our consumer advocacy work by reading our article Stop wasting money on gear.
Anker Powercore PD 10000 and PD 20000 and Nitecore NB10000 and NB20000 carbon fiber portable battery chargers are put through the BatteryBench testing protocol.
In this episode, Andrew chats with Backpacking Light Staff contributor Drew Smith about the PCT, desert hiking, ponchos, and more.
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Summary
In this episode, Andrew chats with Backpacking Light Staff contributor Drew Smith.
If you are a reader of the website, you may know Drew from his lovely stories about desert backpacking, or perhaps you’ve been reading his ongoing series about freeze-drying. If you haven’t read Drew’s work, make sure you check out the resources section (below) where we’ll have links to the articles we talk about in this interview.
Drew Smith grew up in Tuscon and Southern California and dabbled in long-distance hiking in his early twenties before picking it back up again later in life. He’s got a lot of interesting things to say about deserts, gear, food, and how to craft a hiking story, Enjoy!
Make sure you are logged in as a member to listen to or watch the full version of this podcast. Not a member? Click here!
Outline
00:02:10 – Drew’s relationship to the PCT
00:05:08 – how Drew chooses his hikes
00:06:00 – why Drew wrote about his latest section of the PCT
00:08:15 – the apocalyptic trail conditions on the PCT in 2021
00:10:47 – piecing a story together / writing process
00:12:50 – developing themes in a story
00:16:35 – why did Drew start writing?
00:18:10 – avoiding the hero’s journey
00:20:00 – Drew’s desert island non-fiction adventure story
00:21:53 – connection to the desert
00:24:08 – tips to level up desert hiking
—Members Only Begins Here
00:26:38 – the philosophy of tarp camping
00:29:34 – ponchos vs. rain jackets
00:34:15 – stoves
00:36:15 – ukuleles and instruments
00:37:20 – freeze-drying
00:42:26 – the economics of freeze-drying
00:43:17 – how Drew ended up being a member of Backpacking Light
00:44:41 – why does Drew write for Backpacking Light?
Executive Producer - Backpacking Light; Show Director and Host - Ryan Jordan; Producer - Chase Jordan; Theme music: Look for Me in the Mountains written by Chris Cunningham and Ryan Jordan, performed by Chris Cunningham (acoustic guitar, lead and harmony vocals, harmonica), Chad Langford (upright bass), and Tom Murphy (mandolin), produced by Basecamp Studios in Bozeman, Montana.
Sponsorship Policy: Backpacking Light does not accept compensation or donated/discounted products in exchange for product mentions or placements in editorial coverage, including any podcast episode content not excplicitly identified as sponsored content. Some (but not all) of the links in these show notes may be affiliate links. Learn more about affiliate commissions, influencer marketing, and our consumer advocacy work by reading our article Stop wasting money on gear.
Camping near hot springs can be a magical experience for backpackers, but these unique natural features require special care to minimize human impact.
Introduction
This article uses the current Seven Principles of Leave No Trace (LNT) to explore best practices for minimal impact camping near hot springs. These principles are not strict, inviolable rules – aside from one or two involving waste disposal. Instead, they inform sound decision-making. As with many aspects of ultralight backpacking, the exact applications of LNT principles involving hot springs sometimes require exercising judgment informed by the science behind the principles.
Soaking in a hot springs with a great view after a challenging hike, then heading to a nearby campsite to spend the night before soaking again in the morning is something every backpacker should strive to experience.
Guidebooks have helped people discover backcountry hot springs for decades. Combined with social media and articles highlighting hikes to hot springs, there are more ways than ever for people to discover one of nature’s most sublime pleasures. While many of these resources provide information about access to hot springs, they sometimes lack guidance about rules and regulations, basic etiquette, and low-impact visitation techniques.
At developed hot springs accessible by vehicle, there is often infrastructure ranging from outhouse and trash cans to full-blown resorts. Backcountry hot springs often have few, if any, amenities designed to minimize the impacts of visitor use. Given the unique and often ecologically sensitive attributes of hot springs, backpackers must exercise the appropriate amount of responsibility and consideration to minimize impact. By doing so, they will ensure that these magical geothermal features remain ecologically viable – and that future soakers can enjoy as comfortable and natural an experience as possible.
Some precautions when visiting hot springs are common sense, like not bringing glass bottles, whereas others are more nuanced. By discussing each Leave No Trace principle and its relationship to recreating at backcountry hot springs, we hope to provide a useful outline to help hikers and backpackers enjoy themselves responsibly.
The seven principles of Leave No Trace are:
Plan Ahead and Prepare
Travel and Camp on Durable Surfaces
Dispose of Waste Properly
Leave What You Find
Minimize Campfire Impacts
Respect Wildlife
Be Considerate of Other Visitors
Although it is often tempting to want to camp at sites closest to a hot spring, this is less than ideal from both a minimal impact standpoint as well as from an etiquette one. Choose campsites roughly 200 feet or or more from hot springs; the further the better.
Why trust us?
In preparation for this article, I reviewed the published information from the Leave No Trace Center for Outdoor Ethics and other articles that focused on minimizing the environmental impact at hot springs. I also corresponded with JD Tanner, Director of Education and Training at Leave No Trace, for additional insight. Finally, I tapped into my experience practicing Leave No Trace skills while visiting backcountry hot springs. This first-hand knowledge allows me to illustrate certain approaches and provide first-hand observations.
Plan ahead and prepare
Knowing as much as possible about trail conditions and the infrastructure (i.e., designated campsites, outhouses, etc.) en route to and at your destination are key components to a successful trip. Researching regulations, such as group size limits, fire bans, permit needs, and restrictions on camping too close to the hot springs, for example, is also essential.
You can also consider what items might make you more comfortable during your visit. I’ve found that packing in a small microfiber towel for drying off is usually a good call. At particularly rocky hot springs, it can be nice to have a small section of closed-cell foam to sit on, especially if it’s a hotter hot spring and you’ll frequently be taking short breaks from soaking to cool off.
Making calls to the land management agency and perusing information online, such as trip reports, can tell you how crowded the hot spring might be. This basic research might lead you to time your trip differently or at least temper your expectations for a solitary soak. If you find out that the hot spring you’re so eager to visit appears to be mobbed every weekend in the summer, you have some options. “Planning to visit these sites during less popular times of the year is highly encouraged,” said JD Tanner at Leave No Trace. “Checking out less visited hot spring sites would be a great alternative as well.”
Winter is a great time to visit hot springs, not only because of the magnificent contrast between the water and the ambient temperature but because these are typically less-crowded times to visit them. Visiting at less crowded times can help reduce the indirect impacts often created by overuse. Additionally, if the trail and area around the springs is covered in enough snow to be a durable surface, impact is further reduced.
On the not-so-pleasant side, your research might make you aware of issues at the hot springs you plan to visit – like the possible presence of “brain-eating amoeba”. In this example, it’s easy to mitigate exposure by not putting your head underwater. But you have to know about the danger to avoid it! That’s why research is so important!
Hot springs are popular destinations, so many of them have well-defined and sustainable trails that reach them. Some might have multiple side trails branching from the main trail. These side trails can require scouting to choose the one with the least impact. Trails that go straight down a stream bank to hot springs are often erosion-prone but are sometimes unavoidable. Most hot springs have heavily-impacted campsites nearby. As long as they meet the criteria set by the land management agency, these sites are a better choice than making a new campsite in a previously unimpacted area. I’ve found that – somewhat counter-intuitively – it is usually more ideal to choose the campsite furthest from the hot springs. Not only is this in accordance with LNT guidelines about camping 200 feet or more from water sources, but it also provides you with more seclusion. You don’t have folks wandering through your campsite to get to theirs; if there’s a louder group in the pool, you’re out of earshot, and you don’t have your campsite on display to soakers.
This is the best example of a minimal impact campsite near a hot spring – a designated site in a national park several hundred yards from the hot springs. It might not stand out on social media, but it is far and away the option with the least impact.
National parks with designated campsites near hot springs (a depressingly scarce commodity, and permits for these can be competitive) are perhaps the gold standard of low-impact backcountry camping at hot springs. Camping is concentrated in a specific location, and outhouses make waste management during extended stays easier.
JD Tanner with Leave No Trace notes that information gained during the planning stage can help with campsite selection. “Contact the land managers to find out if it is permitted to camp around or near the springs first. If it is permitted, the land manager will likely give specifics on where to camp,” he said. “If they don’t, and there are no designated sites, then camp at least 200 feet away from the water and trails. Always be prepared to pack out trash no matter where you camp.”
Dispose of waste properly
Encountering improperly disposed of human waste near a hot spring is one of the most disgusting backcountry experiences a person can have. I speak from experience. Short of stepping on broken glass, it is perhaps the quickest way to ruin the sense of serenity, rejuvenation, and bliss that accompanies a soak. With most backcountry hot springs lacking outhouses, soakers must travel an appropriate distance – at least 200 feet – from the spring to conduct bowel-related business. Once far enough away, soakers should properly bury the deposit (click here for general LNT cat hole advice). The other option – arguably a better one at hot springs – is to use a waste disposal bag. Plan accordingly and bring a trowel, WAG bag, or whatever else you might need to ensure that your human waste doesn’t contaminate the water – or someone’s foot.
The level of development varies from hot spring to hot spring. Some have simple user-created pools, while others have more elaborate designs or structures built to help keep the springs clean and give users a place to change or get out of the elements in inclement weather. This hot spring also has an outhouse nearby which makes proper disposal of human waste easy.
Leave what you find
The general LNT guideline is to not remove artifacts, rocks, fossils, or other items (other than trash from previous visitors – remove as much as possible!) But there are some hot springs-specific applications for this principle. While the source of the hot water at hot springs is natural, with very few exceptions, previous visitors have constructed the actual pools in which you soak. Generally, these are unobtrusive and blend in with the landscape. But at easier-to-access locations, sometimes people have gotten carried away and used concrete or other materials to build complex pools.
Although great to soak in, these can negatively impact wilderness character and create issues for land managers. Sykes Hot Springs in the Ventana Wilderness is an example of the unintended consequences of trying to create a sweet backcountry soaking spot. Sykes has become a victim of its own success, with land managers left to try and manage the issues created. I’ve also seen a backcountry hot spring pool in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness decrease in quality because people tried to enlarge it by moving the rock and earth embankments. Their attempts at “improvement” caused the size of the pool to grow, but the depth of the pool decreased. This change made it harder to get a nice full-body soak without lying down, which wasn’t ideal.
It can be tempting to try and play dam builder when you have a source of unlimited hot water. It can be even more exciting when there is a cold water source nearby to add to the mix to try and create a perfect temperature for soaking. But keep in mind that doing so has impacts. By and large, it’s best to accept whatever situation you find when you arrive to soak rather than try to build something yourself. Think of how we approach campsites. We’ve left the days of digging a trench around our tents in the past. We should look at our efforts to manipulate soaking spots with similar scrutiny, especially in wilderness areas.
Sometimes the best soaks are in the unlikeliest places. This one is between a highway and a river in an Idaho canyon, but the great temperature of the water and austere yet grand scenery make it hard to pass up on the way to and from backpacking trips.
Minimize campfire impacts
Campfires in any season have become a contentious topic in the backpacking community over the past few years. The topic has been discussed here at Backpacking Light and in numerous other places. The campfire impacts at hot springs are identical to those at other popular areas. The easy-to-obtain firewood sources vanish quickly, resulting in those who want a campfire having to wander further afield. These wanderings often create side trails and disturb wildlife habitats created by downed wood. Some people even chop down nearby trees to use for fires.
It is best to get your warmth from the water, a hot brewed tea, or your insulation layers, not from burning wood.
Respect wildlife
Wildlife can be drawn to hot springs just as much as humans. I’ve seen deer drink at a hot springs in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness and nibble on the plants growing in the warm microclimate while I was soaking. I’ve heard from another soaker that it’s common for moose to visit and wallow around in the springs. Although the hot springs pool easily holds a half-dozen adults, it seems safe to say that a moose should be the sole occupant at any given time.
Generally speaking, the hot springs-specific implementation of this principle isn’t much different than at other campsites. Try not to unnecessarily disturb downed wood, move rocks in the stream, or trample fragile vegetation. Maintain a respectable distance from wildlife, and don’t let your desire to take a picture draw you in too close. If dogs are allowed, ensure they are supervised or restrained so that they aren’t harassing wildlife while you soak. “Keeping pets leashed so they are not being a nuisance to others visiting the hot springs is another great way to be considerate [of other visitors],” noted Tanner.
Be considerate of other visitors
With more people visiting public lands, you must pack patience, respect, and kindness in addition to your other gear. Additionally, hot springs require consideration regarding privacy. Other users might be changing, soaking nude, or enjoying a quiet and contemplative soaking experience rather than looking for conversation with other soakers. Be respectful when taking photos at hot springs when other users are present. Speak quietly, and respect personal space.
Hot springs are popular locations in winter and for good reason. Soaking in hot water when the ambient temperature is below freezing is a sublime experience. Unfortunately, such prime geothermal destinations can get crowded in the winter and contribute to overuse impacts. Try to visit such places on weekdays instead of on weekends if possible. Photo and caption: Mark Wetherington.
It is tempting to soak for hours on end. But if doing so means you’re monopolizing a small pool, it is good etiquette to move on and make room for other users. Other users will appreciate this, and doing the good deed of sharing such a special place can feel almost as good as the soothing waters themselves.
As noted in Respect Wildlife, it is important to be considerate of other visitors if you bring your dog with you. In my experience, when dogs are present at hot springs, the overall ambiance typically deteriorates as the number of dogs increases. People are soaking and relaxing, then two dogs start barking or snipping at each other, and their owners shout from the pool to try and address the issue. Or the dog gets in the hot springs (which isn’t good for the dog, as they are more susceptible to hyperthermia than humans) and then exits and shakes all over other soakers’ towels and clothes. When bringing a dog, be sure you’re prepared to take the appropriate steps to be a responsible owner.
Being mindful of what chemicals might be on your body before entering a hot spring is also a way to be considerate of other visitors. It is obvious that you don’t want to use any soaps or shampoos in a hot spring. But depending on the spring’s flow rate, things like sunscreen or bug spray can transfer from our skin to the water. In addition to sometimes leaving an unsightly film on the water, this can negatively impact the animals that have relationships with the hot springs and the water that ends up downstream. “No matter what water source we may be recreating in, we should always be aware of the chemicals we are putting on our bodies that are then washing off into the water sources we recreate in,” said JD Tanner at Leave No Trace. “The fewer chemicals on our bodies, the better when going swimming or soaking.”
Summary
There are few things better in life than enjoying a relaxing soak at an uncrowded backcountry hot spring and then retiring to a nearby campsite. Going to sleep after stargazing while sitting in a hot spring, then waking up the next morning and starting the day with a soak is sublime. Be informed about the issues that might be creeping up at the hot springs you’re planning to visit and take steps to mitigate your impact. These practices ensure that you will have a great time, and those who come after you will also.
Editor’s note on social media use and hot springs
Andrew Marshall here. You may have noticed that the seven Leave No Trace principles don’t include anything about social media use. Interesting, right?
This spring we published another of Mark’s pieces – a story about the joys of finding unexpected solitude in a very well-known hot spring. Mark is acutely aware of the way social media interacts with – and impacts – our experiences of the outdoors and how those experiences change the landscapes we enjoy. That piece featured several nuanced paragraphs on LNT principles and how identifying less well-known hot springs in social posts can lead to overuse and damage. In that article, we chose to name one well-known hot spring but not another less well-known hot spring.
But we did name the well-known hot spring in the title of the article and referenced the name while promoting the piece on social media. Even though the article explains that choice, the feedback we received on social media was a reminder that far more people see titles than read articles. And as a membership-based website, not everyone has access to the nuance that the full article explored.
So it struck us that we needed to refine our strategy even further when it comes to how we tell stories – and promote those stories – about hot springs and other fragile areas with a tendency toward social-media-driven overuse. We want to be responsible stewards in both our content AND how we promote that content.
There is an ongoing – and well-meaning – debate in the outdoor world about this issue and the related issue of geotagging social media posts. On the one hand, naming place names and geotagging increases traffic to fragile and already over-trafficked locations. On the other hand, keeping places “secret” can smack of exclusion and an “I got there first,” mentality. As an editorial staff, we come down somewhere in the middle. For Mark’s take, check out his interview with the Cascade Hiker Podcast. He also touches on the issue in his Reservations Required piece for Backpacking Light. We discuss this issue in particular – and social media use in general – with Benny Braden in Episode 58 of the Backpacking Light Podcast. We think this guidance from one of Benny’s organizations – Responsible Stewardship – is a good starting place for handling social media.
So how do we balance stewardship with inclusion at Backpacking Light? Our current strategy is to remove place names – in article content, titles, and social media posts – from all but the most extremely well-known locations. On the equity side, we are working to address that with both the Backpacking Light Diversity Fund and editorially with the types of stories we tell and the voices we elevate.
We encourage readers to continue this discussion (politely!) in the comments section here and elsewhere on our forums – remembering that for the most part, we all want to help each other enjoy the outdoors in the best, most ecologically and socially responsible way we can.
Backpacking Light does not accept compensation or donated/discounted products in exchange for product mentions or placements in editorial coverage.
Some (but not all) of the links in this review may be affiliate links. If you click on one of these links and visit one of our affiliate partners (usually a retailer site), and subsequently place an order with that retailer, we receive a commission on your entire order, which varies between 3% and 15% of the purchase price. Affiliate commissions represent less than 15% of Backpacking Light's gross revenue. More than 70% of our revenue comes from Membership Fees. So if you'd really like to support our work, don't buy gear you don't need - support our consumer advocacy work and become a Member instead.
Learn more about affiliate commissions, influencer marketing, and our consumer advocacy work by reading our article Stop wasting money on gear.
Learn Ryan Jordan’s process for discovering hidden backcountry routes by integrating current base maps, satellite imagery layers, and historical USGS maps.
There’s nothing more serendipitous than stumbling across an old road bed while bushwhacking. But you don’t just have to rely on blind luck. With a combination of modern satellite imagery and historical USGA topo maps, you can incorporate such features into your route planning.
In the following video, Ryan Jordan demonstrates:
how to find and use historical USGS topo maps in Gaia GPS
how to identify person-made features in satellite imagery
how to use Gaia GPS layers to confirm your suspicions about possible routes of least resistance
Editor’s Note: This video was shot before we released our First Look review of the Tarptent Dipole Li 1 and 2, so that’s why you’ll notice it blurred out in the video. If you missed that review, check it out here!
Browse our curated recommendations in the Backpacking Light Gear Shop – a product research & discovery tool where you can find Member gear reviews, Gear Swap (used gear) listings, and more info about specific products recommended by our staff and members.
Backpacking Light does not accept compensation or donated/discounted products in exchange for product mentions or placements in editorial coverage.
Some (but not all) of the links in this review may be affiliate links. If you click on one of these links and visit one of our affiliate partners (usually a retailer site), and subsequently place an order with that retailer, we receive a commission on your entire order, which varies between 3% and 15% of the purchase price. Affiliate commissions represent less than 15% of Backpacking Light's gross revenue. More than 70% of our revenue comes from Membership Fees. So if you'd really like to support our work, don't buy gear you don't need - support our consumer advocacy work and become a Member instead.
Learn more about affiliate commissions, influencer marketing, and our consumer advocacy work by reading our article Stop wasting money on gear.
Searching for grace and gratitude through the smoke.
MYTH: a multi-year thru-hike
A goal deferred
Hiking the PCT has turned into something of a life project for me.
My brother and I started north from Walker Pass in 1976, headed for Lake Tahoe, 500 miles to the north. A torn cartilage in my right knee forced a bailout after a hundred miles.
I didn’t resume the trail until 2013, having acquired an education, a family, and a career in the meantime. Also a dog. When I returned to the PCT, Bonny, a 125-lb Newfoundland-sled dog mix was my companion. She had joined our family a few months before, an adult rescue dog who had apparently led a pretty rough life.
Or maybe her incorrigible food stealing, fear of tall teenage boys, and separation anxiety were just who she was. But her need for affection was matched by her ability to give it. We became friends.
She accompanied me north from Lake Morena in 2013. She had no trouble keeping up and would dash around meadows and up and down hills when we camped, delighted to be free and wild.
That went well enough until the winds shifted from cool Pacific westerlies to hot desert easterlies. She was a snow dog, and it was clear that bringing her on a desert hike was a mistake, even in March.
Bonny in her preferred environment.
That ended Bonny’s long-distance hiking career, but she went on plenty of shorter trips in cool mountains. She especially loved going on trips that I lead for the Sierra Club’s ICO program: short hikes, kids to fawn over her and give belly rubs, and plenty of leftovers to clean up after dinner time.
Leading the children through the Mt Evans Wilderness.
Big dogs have big hearts but short lives. Bonny was nine or 10 when she began to weaken. Backpack trips became shorter and then I had to start leaving her behind. Day hikes and ski tours dwindled from five miles to two, and then from one to zero.
Neighborhood walks got shorter and shorter as progressive paralysis set in, weakening not only her legs but closing her windpipe until a walk of half a block left her gasping and needing multiple rest stops.
I put off the inevitable as long as I could but it was time. Bonny departed this life as she lived it, with grace and affection.
Bonny.
On the trail again (Castle Crags to Etna)
I arrived at the Redding Airport and received a text from my ride wondering just where exactly at Castle Crags Campground I was. She had gotten the directions reversed. A phone call set the matter straight and we headed from the airport to the nearest sporting goods store to pick up a butane canister.
A turn around the store revealed no canisters. I asked a clerk and she unlocked a cabinet, pulled one out, and asked for my driver’s license to document the sale. Butane is useful in methamphetamine synthesis. Apparently, there are enough tweakers in Redding, CA to necessitate control of a simple 4-carbon alkane.
Steering clear of degenerates would be an issue for another day, though. My immediate concern was the heat. Even at 5 PM, the temperature at Castle Crags was near 100 F°. I compounded the issue by making an immediate wrong turn that took me over a superfluous ridge before joining the PCT.
It was near dark by the time I made it to a pleasant camp spot along Indian Creek, located in a deep leafy gorge that offered some relief from the heat. It was already occupied by two hikers. Fomo and Princess not only welcomed me but offered to paint my nails as well. I was back on the trail, back with the goofy, welcoming community that populates it.
Last light on my first day back on the PCT.
The night was warm and I started the 4000-foot climb well below dawn, hoping to get high before it got hot. Although that hope was not realized, I did get my first PCT views of Mt. Shasta. In 2018 I hiked from Lake Tahoe to Castle Crags without a glimpse of the iconic peak, visibility limited to a few miles at best by smoke from the terrible fires that year. Although the mountain was snowless in this drought year, I hoped at least to be spared a smoky hike.
Mt Shasta at lasta.
The trail leveled off at Gully Spring, where I lunched in the company of carnivorous pitcher plants and one-striped bumblebees attracted to the swirling patterns of my gaiters. Both are probably endemic to these mountains, well-known to be a hotspot for biological diversity: more than 3500 plant species are found here; some 280 are found nowhere else. I intended to enjoy and appreciate this region of the PCT, a region that is often overlooked by hikers hurrying toward Canada.
Cobra Lillies at Gully Spring.
One of the advantages of MYTHing a long trail is that you get to start each section with the same anticipation and eagerness that most single-year PCT thru-hikers feel only in the desert ranges of Southern California. Read or watch any account of a single-year thru-hike and you’ll notice that half the story covers the desert sections, another quarter covers the Sierra, and the rest of the trail – NorCal, Oregon, and Washington, about 60% of the total mileage – gets only a quarter of the narrative.
By the time PCT hikers get to Lake Tahoe, they have walked 1100 of the trail’s 2650 miles. Hiking has become a job. You get up at dawn, put in your 25 miles, eat some crappy food, make your camp, and lay down to sleep. And then do it again. And again. And again.
Your choice is either to quit (as many do) or to become a hiking automaton obsessed with grinding out the miles before fall snowstorms close the passes. The trail – which started out as a road to freedom and adventure – begins to look more and more like the Land of Toys. I may bear a pack, but I will not become a donkey.
Porcupine Lake, a fine swimming hole.
So I laze in the shade another hour; stop for a swim at Porcupine Lake the next day; stop at Deadfall Lake intending another swim. But clouds have rolled in and a light intermittent drizzle commences. A helicopter appears, dips its bucket in the lake, flies up to an adjoining ridge, and dumps the water. It repeats this sequence three times. I can see no sign of smoke on the ridge. Surely the copter was not practicing; there are plenty of real fires in California.
I hike on through increasingly heavy rain, which is now accompanied by loud thunder overhead. The rain should fireproof this parched area for a few days, but the thunder, soon distant, might well spark fires elsewhere.
After a soggy night, the heat returns, but the hiking is mostly easy. Though the mountains are rugged the trail contours around them, staying between 6,000 and 7,000 feet.
Heading toward the Marbles.
There are cold springs to drink from, fringed with flowers and attended by butterflies.
Butterflies adorn the trail.
The Marble Mountains appear, gleaming white rock mimicking long-melted snow.
The Marble Mountains.
A cool morning breeze makes for delightful hiking weather. But rounding a ridge, a column of smoke appears, rising fat and thick above the ridge. Another hiker – trail name TimeWarp – comes up and we confer. Is this a small fire nearby or a large fire far away? The fractal nature of smoke clouds defeats any sense of scale. We decide to proceed, even though the column is directly on our course toward Etna Summit. The wind is blowing left to right, not into our faces, and we can retreat back to highway 3, some 15 miles back, if the fire blocks our path.
Uh oh.
TimeWarp finds a spot with reception and calls the Forest Service. They tell him the fire is 10 miles west of the PCT, we are in no danger. But that column of smoke gets bigger and darker and redder on the underside. We catch up to yet another hiker – Tumbles – confer again, and agree that we will stop at the Callahan Road crossing a couple of miles ahead and consider bailing.
Looks like trouble.
As soon as we get to the road four volunteer fire trucks whiz by, not a good sign. One pickup comes back and we flag it down. It is driven by Bill, a retired firefighter who says the fire has blown up in the last few hours and nobody knows what is going on, especially not the Forest Service. He offers us a ride into Etna and we accept. It would probably be ok to keep hiking but “probably ok” is not the standard we want to apply to this situation.
The town of Etna (population 750) is amazing. It sports two brewpubs and a couple of good coffee shops. For a minimal fee, it lets hikers sleep in a park that features not only restrooms and water but a shower (cleaned daily by volunteers), wifi, tables, a shelter, and outlets to recharge phones. The townspeople are friendly and welcoming. An easy place to hang out, as attested to by nearly a hundred hikers milling about the town. Not just easy, amazing.
Taking refuge inside a brewpub.
Through the state of Jefferson, Seiad to Ashland
All of us were hoping for some more information. But word is that hikers who attempt to resume the trail are being turned back by thick smoke or by rangers at the trailhead.
My plan (and that of many others) was to skip ahead to Seiad Valley to bypass the fires and smoke. It’s about 60 miles by trail but twice that by sparsely traveled roads and reputedly a very hard hitch.
A ride was arranged with a hiker named SoleSaver, who was to ferry me and six other refugees northward. All went well until the car overheated on the remote road connecting Ft Jones with Seiad Valley.
I hopped out and while everyone was milling around, saw some blackberry bushes lining the road and walked toward them, thinking to score some fresh berries.
An angry man with no shirt but a beard down to his belly ran out of his house and yelled up at me.
“What the FUCK do you think you are doing!”
“Just curious as to what’s here,” I replied. Wrong answer.
“Take your curious ass and get the hell away from my property and keep going.”
One of the women tried engaging him with reason: we can’t go anywhere, we are broken down, etc. Studio, a public defender in St. Louis and thus a man familiar with criminal psychology, walked her away, hoping to de-escalate the situation before any weapons were involved. There was no phone service, no law nearby, and no one was going to protect us if things got ugly. We were deep in the State of Jefferson, home to secessionists and outlaws, a refuge no doubt for illicit grow operations and cook labs. Hikers were most certainly not wanted here and we would not be missed.
SoleSaver was flummoxed by the breakdown. I went back to the car, took a look under the hood and saw the lower radiator hose had popped off. All I had to do was reconnect it, fill it with water and we would be off.
An elderly gentleman was walking up his driveway toward us and I prepared to be cussed out again. Instead, he offered help. His name was Carl, he was 90 years old, a retired gold miner, and he volunteered to go back down to his well and get some water and haul it up.
I got under the car and tried reconnecting the hose but the hose clamp was stripped and would not tighten down. I asked Carl if he had any duct tape and he slowly walked down to his shed and returned with a roll.
Fortunately, there was another hiker (Cocacola) willing to get his hands dirty and we took turns tearing off strips of tape and wrapping them around the hose. We poured water into the radiator. Despite high hopes for our handiwork, the water ran right out again. The hose had been repaired in another spot and was leaking where the plumber’s putty had failed.
Fixing a hole.
By this time another Jeffersonian from across the road was shouting at us to move on and to not even think about coming on to his property. He returned to his porch and sat there with a rifle on his lap, glaring down at us.
The other hikers decided that maybe it was time to hitch onward to a place where there were no angry armed hillbillies yelling at us. It was getting late and this was not a good spot to be when the sun went down. They promised to call SoleSaver’s husband from Seiad so he could come get her. SoleSaver was in the car, sobbing into the steering wheel.
Cocacola and I got back under the car, scraped off the putty with our knives, wrapped the connector with tape, then wrapped the whole assembly over and over (its hose clamp was also stripped), and poured in the water.
This time it held. We made the remaining 15 miles to Seiad just a few minutes after the hitchhikers, who insisted on buying us beers at the store.
It was a hot and heinous climb out of Seiad the next morning. The smoke had thinned a bit, but some of the ridges were dead zones, places of orange metallic soil where little grew. The effect was ghastly and unnerving, but eventually, the forests returned and a few springs popped up. We were in the last bits of California. With a clearing west breeze, we could see Oregon from the high points.
The last of California.
It looked just like California of course, the 42nd parallel having no particular biological or geological significance. But it felt like progress. I had started this MYTH in 2013, walking from Lake Morena to the San Jacintos; continued in 2014 to Walker Pass; to Lake Tahoe in 2016, and then to Castle Crags in 2018.
Hike the trail over a stretch of years like this, and you notice changes. I started in the pre-Wild era when only a few hundred people attempted the PCT each year. Now there are thousands. Permits are required to regulate the traffic, and several iconic trail angel stops have had to close up, unable to cope with the crowds. Although the megadrought was already well underway in 2013, the new normal of wildfires and smoke had not yet taken hold. It was easy then to believe that it was just a dry year. Next year would be normal.
The sociology of the trail has also changed. There are far more women hiking now, and a far larger proportion are hiking without male companions. In 2013 and 2014 there were plenty of Iraq and Afghanistan vets walking off the traumas of war; in the plague year of 2021, they have been replaced by nurses.
Nurses with a wicked sense of humor. When TimeWarp asked Tumbles for some free medical advice regarding a bothersome ankle, she shot back that “I can’t help you unless your pants are off and you have a vagina,” (she is a labor and delivery nurse).
The trail has changed and it will continue to change. It is a living thing, and change is the essence of life. All we can do is keep moving and appreciate what good remains and work for more good to come. The west wind continued to blow the smoke away as I walked the ridges toward Ashland, the north slopes of Mt Shasta receding but revealing that a bit of snow remained there, holding on through the heat and the drought.
Farewell to Mt Shasta.
Feeling the heat – Ashland to Crater Lake
After a zero in Ashland, spent mostly at a brewery where I managed to hold the cornhole court until closing, I hitched back to Callahan’s. The free hiker campground there, I learned to my displeasure, is a grassy island in a parking lot that boasts many bright security lights. So I was up and out early, making the climb south and east from Siskiyou Pass back into the higher mountains. Smoke built through the day, as did the heat. Much of the hike was through arid oak and pine forests separated by meadows dried to a crisp by the drought.
Pilot Rock presides over desiccated forests in southern Oregon.
I holed up for the night near one of the few sources of water, the outflow from Little Hyatt Reservoir. The water was low and distinctly skanky, but there was no other water on offer, so I treated it with chlorine dioxide drops and made the best of it.
The evening’s entertainment was provided by a frisky yearling blacktail deer. It dashed by through the creek meadows and so I was on the lookout for a lion stalking it. But then it dashed back the way it had come. And then diagonally across the creek. And then back again. In all, it made six or seven passes through the forests and meadows, all by itself, delighted to be wild and free, in love with its home.
I am every bit as unhappy as I look.
Another heat dome set itself up in Oregon, making it way too hot and way too smoky. Fearing damage to my lungs, I wore an N95 mask despite the heat. The dust was fine and thick on the trail, combining with my copious sweat to create a kind of tar on my feet and legs. The springs and creeks were dried up and 15-mile water carries became the norm, not what I was expecting from Oregon. When I came to the trail junction above Fish Lake it was an easy call to cut down to the resort where showers and cold drinks awaited.
Swimming and boating were not among the amenities available at Fish Lake.
But hanging out in a resort was only a temporary respite. The heat and smoke continued to oppress. The PCT is mostly a ridgeline trail in southern Oregon. It overlooks any number of lakes (this was the Sky Lakes Wilderness), but they were only faintly visible. Mt McLoughlin loomed through the smoke but quickly disappeared again. The skies cleared a bit one night and a number of Perseid meteors appeared, a good omen. However, the relatively clear skies of morning did not last. Ten miles of hiking through a shadeless burn area on the south side of Crater Lake National Park depleted my water and forced me off-trail to dip from a warm tannic pond.
Another hot and smoky morning.
The mood at the Crater Lake hiker campground was subdued bordering on sullen. There was little sign of the usual hiker lightheartedness. No one here signed up for this kind of punishment. Hikers who walked 1800 miles to get here from Mexico – obviously not wimps or quitters – were ready to quit. Or take a week or two off. Or just hitch up to Washington where surely the skies would be clear, the air would be cool and the springs would be flowing. Where a hiker could hike, not just slog through smoke and heat. Washington would be better. It had to be.
Reprieve – Crater Lake to Elk Lake
Like everyone else not hitching out, I took the Rim Trail around Crater Lake, rather than the official PCT which runs in parallel a few miles to the west. Because why would you not want to walk around the rim of one of the most spectacularly beautiful lakes in the world?
Crater Lake in the morning.
The smoke was not bad in the morning and in fact imparted a bit of hazy mystery to the scene, not unlike a Japanese watercolor. But it got smokier through the day, and by the time I got to the north end of the lake, I had my N95 mask on again.
Crater Lake at noon.
The next morning was cold and windy, with wet clouds whipping up the mountainside. I was thrilled to put on my down sweater and wind shirt, and even fantasized about having to hike in the rain.
Although it didn’t rain, fog dripped from the trees. The trail was transformed from a hot, dusty, smoky slog to something cool, dark, and somewhat mysterious. After days of misery, I was hiking in clean cool air. It made hiking fun again and I took advantage of the opportunity to stretch my legs and cruise through the forest.
The fog and cold wind were a welcome change.Southbounders water up at Thielsen Creek.
The clear air brought views of the isolated conical peaks of the Oregon Cascades. These mountains are very different from the ranges I know best – the Rockies, the Sierra, the Transverse Ranges of California, and the Sky Islands of southern Arizona. Sharp volcanic peaks rise out of a skirt of rolling forested hills. They seem scattered about more or less at random within a north-south corridor that must be a tectonic plate boundary.
A peak in the Oregon Cascades.
There are plenty of lakes here but little running water.
Oregon lake country.
The miles beyond my last resupply at Shelter Cove rolled on, pleasant but unremarkable. The smoke was never wholly absent, but in the deep forest, it was easy to ignore, to avoid thinking about what was happening in distant forests. Lakes appeared, beautiful and sparkling in the summer sun. They were low, but not obviously low. Patches of blueberries crowded the trail at times, and maybe if you didn’t know better you wouldn’t realize that delicious as the berries are, they are also sparse and a bit desiccated.
The blueberries were hanging on.
I will be exiting the trail soon, but it feels like the trail is making its own exit. A walk through another burn area festooned with fireweed makes the point. Change is coming, change is already here.
I walk knowing I will never see this place again. Not just because I am old, but because this world is old. We’ve lived for the last 10,000 years in a world of mild and stable climate, an anomaly in climate history. That anomaly gave us the chance to invent agriculture, and thus invent cities and, eventually, the notions of progress and freedom and wilderness.
A stable climate regime also let plants and animals engage in exuberant rounds of diversification and specialization, each new species a bit better at exploiting a niche environment, each one a bet that the niche would persist and not leave it stranded. With our specialized dependence on agriculture, we have made the same bet: that we would know what crops to plant and when and where. Now we are losing that bet, victims of our own success.
I come to the place where I will turn right and leave the trail. I stop, unwilling to make my exit just yet. I drop my pack, lean back against a fir. Regard the scene. The forests, the meadows, the lakes, the birds, the bugs, the pitcher plants, the yearling deer skittering through the woods: all beautiful, all on their way out. They too have lived lives of grace and affection. I say a few words of gratitude for this and depart.
Backpacking Light does not accept compensation or donated/discounted products in exchange for product mentions or placements in editorial coverage.
Some (but not all) of the links in this review may be affiliate links. If you click on one of these links and visit one of our affiliate partners (usually a retailer site), and subsequently place an order with that retailer, we receive a commission on your entire order, which varies between 3% and 15% of the purchase price. Affiliate commissions represent less than 15% of Backpacking Light's gross revenue. More than 70% of our revenue comes from Membership Fees. So if you'd really like to support our work, don't buy gear you don't need - support our consumer advocacy work and become a Member instead.
Learn more about affiliate commissions, influencer marketing, and our consumer advocacy work by reading our article Stop wasting money on gear.
Learn how to identify and use lines of position to help fix your location on a map while traveling in the backcountry.
Introduction
Knowing where you are in the backcountry and identifying that location on a map (“fixing your position”) is an essential skill. Doing so with analog tools (e.g., map and compass) seems to be a lost art, having been replaced by the digital position fix marker found in GPS smartphone apps.
“You are here…” Has the GPS position fix icon become the golden calf of backcountry navigation?
In this skills article, you’ll learn a fundamental map use technique – what lines of position are and how to use them to fix your position on a map in the backcountry.
What is a line of position?
If you look at your map and say, “Hmmm…I’m somewhere on this map.” that’s not going to inspire a lot of navigational confidence.
In my last trip into the Maze in Canyonlands National Park, I used the analog techniques of dead reckoning (movement time tracking) and lines of position to navigate more than any other technique. This is not a great environment to be asking the question, “Hmmm…I wonder where I am on this map?”
However, if you knew with certainty that you were somewhere along a line on the map, that may make you feel quite a lot better about where you’ve come from and where you’re going.
A line of position, or LOP (sometimes called a “position line”) is a line on the map where you know with 100% certainty that you are somewhere along that line.
Lines of position may be straight (e.g., a boundary fence) or they may be nonlinear (e.g., a trail).
I knew with 100% certainty that we were on this hiking trail. That trail was our known line of position. But it’s not clear or obvious what our exact position is. For that, we need one more line of position.
What are examples of lines of position?
The most important thing about a line of position is that it must always be identifiable on a map. A stream you discover in real life that isn’t on the map cannot be a line of position.
Lines of position can be manmade features, topographical features, terrain features, or sighted bearing lines.
Manmade lines of position:
trails
roads
fences
powerlines
Topographical features that can serve as lines of position:
ridges (where peaks and passes live)
valleys (drainages)
steep slopes or cliffs adjacent to significantly less-steep terrain
benches
plateau boundaries (i.e., topographic perimeter)
Terrain features that can serve as lines of position:
streams
lake shorelines
changes in vegetation
Sighted bearing lines can also serve as lines of position. These are the imaginary lines drawn between a known landmark and your current position. In most cases, they require the use of a compass.
The exception to this is when you, and two other (known) landmarks lie along a straight line. This type of LOP is called a transit line. A compass isn’t needed to draw a transit line.
Two or more lines of position = a position fix
The magic happens when you arrive at a point where two lines of position intersect. At that point, you can fix your precise location on the map.
One of the most obvious intersections of two lines of position for hikers is where a trail crosses a stream. As long as you’re paying attention as you hike, and make a mental note of major stream crossings that correspond to mapped streams, this is a reliable method for fixing your position. However, it can become confusing if you are hiking in particularly wet areas, or during the early summer, when you may cross several streams that are too small to appear on the map.
Any two lines of position mentioned in the previous section can be used to fix your location – the combinations seem limitless. The next section outlines some common examples.
Examples of intersecting lines of position used to fix your position on a map
1. Trail LOP intersects another trail LOP at a trail junction
In most National Parks and other popular hiking destinations, we can enjoy the informative benefit of signed trail junctions. In the absence of signs, we can still use the information reliably – assuming our maps are up to date!
Position fix: trail junction. LOPs: two trails.
2. Trail LOP intersects a stream LOP at a bridge
This method is most reliable for significant streams that flow year-round, are mapped, and travel through topographically-obvious valleys that we can visually identify in real life.
Position fix: stream crossing or bridge. LOPs: trail and stream.
3. Trail LOP intersects a vegetation boundary LOP when it enters a meadow
This method requires updated maps. Be cautious of wildfire-burned areas that have appeared before the printing date of your map – vegetation cover can change significantly with wildfire.
Position fix: forest-meadow vegetation edge. LOPs: trail, meadow perimeter.
4. Trail LOP intersects a ridge LOP at a pass
Recognizing passes, ridges, and other topographic features requires practice. Make it a routine to take your map with you everywhere and correlate the terrain you see in real life with the shapes of the topographic lines on the map.
Position fix: a pass. LOPs: trail and a ridge.
5. Sight line LOPs (compass required) to known landmarks that intersect with topographic LOP
In the absence of trails, you’ll need to get more creative. Here’s an example of a mountaineering route I attempted up the north ridge of a prominent peak in Montana. Most of the climb was performed in low-visibility conditions (cloud cover). I was handrailing (a technique where you follow a natural terrain feature) along the western edge of the summit plateau, which fell off steeply to cliffed terrain. So when the clouds cleared enough, I was able to sight a bearing line to Peak 11792 (compass required), and then draw that bearing line onto my map. My approximate position fix was where the bearing line LOP intersected my route LOP at the western edge of the plateau.
Position fix: the intersection of a bearing line sighted to Peak 11792 (LOP #1) and a topographic feature (slope change boundary at the plateau perimeter – LOP #2).
6. Trail LOP intersects a transit line LOP (no compass required)
We recently hiked the Ute Trail in Rocky Mountain National Park, and encountered a classic example of a transit line LOP. A transit line is a straight line that intersects your current position and two visible landmarks. Transit line LOPs can be used to orient a map, or sight a bearing without using a compass.
The two landmarks I observed were a small unnamed topographical bump (foreground) and the very prominent north face of Long’s Peak (background):
Position fix: at the intersection of the Ute Trail (LOP #1) and a sight line (LOP #2) intersecting me, a topo bump, and Long’s Peak.
Now, simply drawing a line on the map from Long’s Peak, through the topo bump, and intersecting the Ute Trail, I can fix my position on the trail. In addition, by laying the map on the ground, and rotating it so the transit line drawn on my map is parallel to my line of sight to Long’s Peak, it’s now oriented. All this without using a compass – such is the power of a transit line.
Conclusion
Understanding how to identify and use multiple lines of position (LOPs) to fix your position on a map is one of the most valuable navigation skills you can learn. This technique does not require a compass most of the time, so it’s very fast and simple to learn. Practice it!
An online live (and recorded) webinar introduction to map and compass use for hiking and backpacking.
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