Articles (2020)

Editor’s Note: This feature originally ran in Issue 8 of the BackpackingLight Print Magazine.

Pencil Pushing

My desk is boring. On a nice summer day, I get all itchy. I work at home, and looking out the windows, I see mountains. This lovely view can really needle me, those mountains whispering that I ditch the desk and enter.

I live in a beautiful place. Home for me is rural Idaho, just three miles from the Wyoming state line. When I look out my window, I can see the rolling foothills of the Tetons across the border in Wyoming. Beyond is the astounding backcountry of the Jedediah Smith Wilderness and the big peaks of Grand Teton National Park.

Right next to my desk there’s a clock, and over the last few summers I’ve made good use of that thing.

In summer, when the days are long, I can quickly pack up all the essentials for a single overnight and walk out the door. It’s a short drive to the nearest trailhead. From backing out of my driveway to hiking on the trail: about twenty minutes. In mid-summer, there is plenty of time before the sun goes down. With a light pack on my back, I can take advantage of this additional daylight and get surprisingly deep into the mountains to set up camp with a headlamp.

If I leave my house at 6 o’clock, I can walk for a few hours, sleep out under the stars, wake up early and walk around, and be home before noon. Then, back at the desk, I’m rejuvenated and content. The computer and pens are a little less oppressive, and my work is a little more enjoyable.

It’s Not a Marathon

These little one-night excursions now feel like something essential to my psyche. They are an exercise in spiritual renewal, a much needed revival of the soul. Yes, I know that sounds all lofty and snooty. I’ll put it a different way: It can be really nice to get away from all the trappings of "this" world and get out into "that" world, even if only for a few hours. The lessons I’ve learned from this are simple and rewarding. The most important is that sleeping outside in the forest is easy. Grabbing some gear and just going is always an option. It’s not difficult.

My calling: Make it even easier. I can look out my window, and I can usually get a pretty good idea what the weather is going to do in the short term. If it all looks good, I leave the weight of the shelter behind and sleep out under the stars.

I want to share this with friends, so I’ll get on the phone and pester them to join me, and they’ll tell me how wonderful it sounds. They act enthusiastic, but all too often they never come along. They really seem to want to, but their hurdle always ends up being, "My camping gear is all stored away, and it’s just too complicated to get it all organized."

It’s a sad excuse. How much gear is really required? The thing that has made this easy for me has been to simply have all my gear ready to go, all summer long. It’s merely in a big cardboard box, and I rummage through and toss stuff in my pack. Why does it seem so difficult? Somehow camping has become a reflection of our gadget hungry consciousness In their eyes, it’s all equated to problematic loads of tricked-out materialism.

We’ve separated ourselves from Mother Nature, and the simple act of walking out into her nurturing embrace should never be daunting. Jeepers, just cram a few things in your pack and let’s go!

Doesn’t Have to Be Perfect

Another bonus of these modest outings: It’s a good way for me to fine tune my ever-evolving system. As a way to challenge myself, I’ll always try to do something different. It’s a fun experiment to tweak the contents of my pack on every one of these outings. Cut the sleeping pad even shorter? Leave the stove behind? Jolt caffeine gum instead of coffee?

Maybe someday it’ll become perfect, but where’s the fun in that? These little one-nighters allow me to refine my skills at ultralight backpacking and camping, and I reap the benefits when it comes time to plan those more ambitious multi-day trips.

More than anything, I go into nature for my own sanity. It’s a metaphysical fix, and even if it’s only one night, there’s a renewal of the spirit. On such a deep and simple level, sleeping on the ground is truly rejuvenating. I love the smell of the pine needles, the sound of the crickets and the connection I feel lying upon this magnificent earth. I experience an alteration of my busy mind, and I delight in its result.

How difficult is it, really? I am very fortunate to live so close to such impressive wilderness, but we all must have someplace beautiful and secluded nearby.

I lived for a time in New York City. Just a little bit north of that urban prison, I had a perfect flat spot, just big enough for me to lie down, and it was easy to get to from the confines of my apartment. I slept there often.

It can be done.

3. READY-TO-GO MENU

Rather than trying to make every backcountry sojourn a culinary orgy, create simple and straightforward two-, three-, and five-day menus that are easy to shop for and package. Again, you can adjust as you see fit, but the idea is to reduce the friction of planning and packing to an absolute minimum.

4. FOOD BOX

The food box is a second clear plastic container that you store excess backcountry food in. It provides a rolling stock from which to provision your trips. Like the gear box, it has a manila envelope taped inside the lid with copies of shopping lists for your respective menus. When you are getting ready for a trip, you simply grab the most appropriate shopping list and head to the grocery store with the kind of laser-like focus that will have you pointed toward the trailhead pronto.

5. RELOAD

For this system to work well, it is important that when you return from a trip, everything goes back in its place. You clean and restock as necessary. That way, the next time you open up your calendar and see a little daylight, getting ready to hit the trail will be virtually effortless.

6. RETHINK TIME REQUIREMENTS

In addition to getting your house in order from an organizational standpoint, it also makes sense to reassess just how much time you need to pull off a successful and rewarding backpacking trip. A while back, I was talking with a friend who has a family and a demanding job. After he had described a litany of very cool trips he’d taken during the last year, I asked him how he’d been able to get out so often, given the obvious demands on his time. His response? Overnight trips. So if you have trouble knocking loose for more than a day or two, head out anyway. You might be surprised at how much satisfaction you can pack into what seems like only a handful of hours.

Editor’s Note: This feature originally ran in Issue 3 of the BackpackingLight Print Magazine.
***
“Store your gear in a big plastic box,” writes Matt Colón in his “Get Out Now!” article.

His favorite box: a 110-liter Rubbermaid storage bin. The presumption is that organization and tidiness of your gear store will decrease the time required to plan a backcountry trek, improving the chances that you’ll actually take one.

I started out with one of these boxes, full of all the gear a guy could ever want.

But my duties as a product tester eventually moved me to two, and then three boxes, which eventually occupied a closet. Finally, I invested in a box caddy, which of course expanded to hold twelve boxes and now enjoyed its own space in the garage. It too, held all the gear a guy could ever want.

When the prospect of adding another twelve-box unit to the garage threatened Stephanie’s ability to park her car inside on those negative-thirty-degree Montana winter days, I was demoted – no, wait, promoted! – to my very own off-site storage unit. This, of course, greatly simplified matters. When it came time to prepare for a trip, enjoy some time alone, read a book, or just kick back and drink a glass of milk, all I had to do was drive a few blocks to my storage unit and enjoy any one of these activities surrounded by, what else? That’s right: all the gear a guy could ever want.

Until the storage unit got full.

Backpacking gear, day-hiking gear, winter backpacking gear, ski gear (randonee, tele, and alpine), pontoon boats, fly rods, sleds (and pulks – why, yes, of course there is a difference), and more.

So I moved into a warehouse. And then a bigger warehouse. At one point, my office occupied the top floor of the warehouse and I was again surrounded by… all the gear a guy could ever want.

And for 90% of my trips, I fit what I actually need into a thirty-liter backpack. And once I’m on the trail… it holds all the gear a guy could ever want.

Photos courtesy of Ryan Krueger and Outside Bozeman Magazine.

The paths that led me to eventually (and finally) plunking my backside into a packraft were circuitous at best.

Path 1

I grew up rafting. My family co-owned a ten-man raft with a few other families – we all chipped in because no one could afford one outright – but it “lived” at our house. We’d fill the cooler with drinks, grab a bucket of KFC, and hit the Yellowstone River by noon on a hot summer Saturday. Floating down the dun-colored river, slipping in to cool off when the tubes got too hot, pulling off at little islands that caught our fancy, jumping out to pretend that the three of us girls could help our parents drag the raft over shallow rock beds… it was heaven. We returned home happily tired and sunburnt, content in our day on the water.

As a result, I’ve always been comfortable on moving water, but large bodies of water freak me out. There are monsters in lakes, ponds, and oceans, so I tend to approach them with ambivalence and caution – much the way I approach my crawlspace and for the same reason. Rivers, however, have always been a source of delight to me, from swimming in them to camping near them to being surrounded by them in Bozeman.

Path 2

Though I was the customer support director for Backpacking Light Magazine for two years, my grasp of the written word and the proper use of mechanics, grammar, and spelling meant that I was regularly called upon to proofread articles before they were published, both online and in the print magazine. When Ryan Jordan worked with Roman Dial on a book dedicated to packrafting and educating the continental U.S. on the sport (packrafting is pretty established in Alaska, the original home of Alpacka Raft), I was included, copy-editing and proofreading and reference-checking the manuscript so many times that I thought my eyes were going to bleed. It was awesome. I gained insight into the complete process of publishing a book and what a pain in the rear it can be.

Packrafting sounded intriguing, fun, and a little bit thrilling given the size of the craft, though I was reasonably sure I’d never do it. I couldn’t afford a packraft, and probably wouldn’t have used it often enough to justify the purchase anyway. Ever since my late husband, Blake Morstad (who wrote for BPL), died in an avalanche, I was so preoccupied with our son that the idea of backpacking, camping, or hiking again was pushed firmly towards the back of my mind. Single parenthood was far too pressing, and I really only enjoy such recreational pursuits when done with others. I am not a solitary outdoor gal.

Still, I knew WAY more about packrafting than the general public, though that knowledge was largely useless unless I was at work giving customers counsel about the rafts they were considering buying. I was, in effect, an armchair expert. Which, when you think about it, is really the most dangerous kind of expert there is.

Path 3

Backpacking Light’s Wilderness Trekking School started off in a big way, with a trail-less traverse of the Absaroka-Beartooth Range that was long, technical, and out of my league. The idea of joining that first, expedition-length class in October of 2007 didn’t even cross my mind. I was too busy making sure the students were kitted out in the gear they needed, that they had signed medical forms, that I had emergency contact information for everyone, and that everyone coughed up their watches, cell phones, and mp3 players. Besides, I didn’t want to cross the Absaroka-Beartooth range in the snow. It sounded suspiciously like a LOT of work.

We’ve retooled and revisited the School since then, and 2009 has been our most ambitious year yet, offering a wide variety of courses of various lengths on several dates. Currently managing editor, I was so buried in the weekly articles and newsletter that the first I really heard about all this was when Ryan Jordan emailed ’round a link to the School’s homepage, asking for input, feedback, and proofreading. I immediately noticed the introductory packrafting class and its requirements, which I easily met. Now that I’ve remarried and have someone slightly less demanding and needy than my four-year-old son to add to play time, I read about the classes hungrily, anticipating a day when we’d backpack or even just car camp as a family, and all my head knowledge about going lightweight could actually see some use.

I emailed Ryan back, noting my changes and feedback, and remarked that the Introduction to Packrafting looked particularly intriguing. In a separate email, he invited me and Rob, my husband, to join BPL for the June class.

Bozeman Beach

Class started at Bozeman Beach for a primer and practice before heading out. Bozeman Beach is a man-made lake (see Path 1, above) that feeds into the East Gallatin River. A lake. And it was warm, but the water wasn’t 80 degrees, and we were going to get into the lake to practice tooling around in our BPL-provided packrafts.

To my surprise, the monsters must have realized they were outnumbered, and there were no attacks during our time on flat water. We practiced entry and exit at the shore, then wet reentry, which was frustratingly difficult. To begin the wet reentry, we had to forcibly flip our rafts over while in them, which was reassuringly difficult.

The spray skirt on my packraft, when sealed, also made being submerged upside down a little alarming, and I was grateful to have practice time on flat water, no matter how monster-infested. I’m an able swimmer and comfortable on moving water, but the very real dangers associated with water travel are sobering, and being stuck in an upside-down packraft while bobbing downstream would inspire panic in the levelest head. Entry and exit are a really big deal!

Yo-Yoing on the Madison

I’m the kind of girl who likes to get something just right the first time. That rarely happens, which may be why I have to be coaxed into trying new things. Despite my armchair expertise, I found each and every move that Mike and Andy taught us an exercise in frustration. I ferried across the river just fine, in good style with powerful strokes. Turning around, I kept hearing Andy yell “Addie! Forty-five degrees! FORTY-FIVE DEGREES!” as I carefully manuevered my bow forty-five degrees downstream and began ferrying back, ending up MUCH further downstream than I’d intended. I wasn’t scared (we were on the Booze Cruise of the Madison River, after all), but was exasperated that I had forgotten the second half of cross-current ferrying: upstream. To ferry across the current effectively, point the bow forty-five degrees UPSTREAM.

Thankfully, no one gave up on me, including myself, despite Andy offering to tie me to a tether to keep me in the right stretch of water. He’s so helpful, that one. The other students fared better, especially Greg, who floated around like he’d been doing this all his life. I kept laughing at myself and trying again and found that, while my technique showed little improvement, I was still having a good time. Maybe new things aren’t so bad. Maybe.

The packrafts are surprisingly comfortable, despite being about the size of an average bathtub, and it was a little strange to get used to being so close to the water level. Most packrafts have twelve-inch tubes, part of which are submerged, so you are right there on the surface of the water. Paddling wasn’t difficult, and though my arms sometimes got tired, I wasn’t ever sore, so no new muscle groups were overly exerted (something I had worried about beforehand). Rob and I also discovered the magic of polarized lenses, a small thing that has him more excited about learning to fly-fish.

Sunburnt Rednecks at Greycliff

Our first camp was at the Greycliff Fishing Access. Because of private land use and guide restrictions, we were limited to Fish, Wildlife, and Parks established campgrounds. Upside: picnic tables, flat ground for tents/tarps, and easy river access. Downside: other campers might not be as dedicated to anything like a true wilderness experience. It was surreal to come off the water to the sound of boozy neighbor campers and music blaring from their car stereo. Despite creating an otherwise hostile camping situation, they were friendly, and we did our best to rough it next to the local fauna and their firecrackers. We pitched a variety of shelters that I won’t even pretend to know, and dinner was a tasty mess of unexpectedly filling noodles with Mike Clelland!’s spicy peanut Thai sauce. Mike and Andy interjected lightweight lessons whenever applicable, and everyone slept as soundly as possible once all was quiet on the western front.

Because of runoff, the river was high enough to get us moving along quickly, though many of the features that appear later in the season were covered over, reducing rock garden playgrounds into smooth flat water. The downside of a beginner packrafting class on the Madison began to make itself apparent in the second half of the day. The river flattened and widened, to the point that we paddled enthusiastically whenever we saw the tiniest froth of white on the water, had a laughably short “Whee!” moment, and were back to a simple float trip.

It’s difficult to plan a beginner river course in the spring in Bozeman. Both river conditions and student conditions can vary wildly, and it’s better to plan safely rather than daringly when it comes to peoples’ lives. At least, that’s what I hear.

Rob actively pursued small side channels to vary the pace and view and was aggressive with the river, pursuing any riffle, obstacle, or wave train. I was more of a weenie, just enjoying the float. The freedom and independence of the packraft were deeply relaxing. I could drift with the current (which, for me meant backwards, based on the weight distribution), get closer to interesting cliff swallow formations, dodge the cliff swallow droppings, or practice the various skills we’d learned.

Despite practicing, I only got ONE skill right ONE time (a snicker-snack, perfectly timed). Otherwise, I would pirouette or snicker-snack too early and smack right into the rock. I got better at just avoiding obstacles outright (we had plenty of time to get out of the way), and will perhaps try again on a rockier river, where perfecting my form is a necessity rather than simply a diversion.

Three Forks

At some point on day two, we reached the confluence of the Madison, Jefferson, and Gallatin – making the mighty Missouri. The river widened and deepened again, slowing us to where paddling was needed at first, just to make enough progress to matter. Canoeists and rafters shouted hellos, and the Jefferson’s silty flow made our boats sing with suspected leaks. It was an eerie sound, hearing the millions of tiny pings colliding with our crafts, a shushing hiss that made us wonder at the sheer abrasiveness of the water.

We drifted under bridges both used and abandoned, opined at the function of a remote stone structure that looked like a long horse barn (we decided it was probably a kiln), and mused on what it must have been like for Lewis and Clark to portage up this monster, upstream on brush-clogged banks. We tried our hands at crossing eddy fences, finally seeing the power of those seemingly gentle two lane river roads. When most of the water is going downstream and the eddy is moving upstream, the line between them can suck a packraft under lickety-split, and Greg got dumped. He didn’t lose anything in the river and quickly made use of our learned wet-reentry.

The power of the water is easy to underestimate, and I had no desire to get stuck outside the boat (wet reentry was a chore for me, not because of my bosom, as I jokingly claimed, but probably due to a combination of my PFD getting stuck on the tube and a lack of upper body strength).

Camp that night was just slightly more pleasant in terms of company. Our only neighbors were still heavy drinkers, but instead of liquor, they went straight for our blood. The swarms of mosquitoes and alarmingly visible ticks kept me a little paranoid and kept everyone close to the small fire we built.

Greg brought out some Swiss chocolate he’d schlepped all the way over (he’s currently working in Switzerland), and we tucked in and enjoyed further conversation. Andy is an excellent talker, but he’s also skilled at asking questions to draw people out and gain their opinions, and since everyone there had one or two of THOSE, we had some lively discussions about some pretty random things. This particular feature of camping is my forte, where I feel most comfortable: the relationships. Getting to know everyone a little bit more than simply how they came to the class made them more complete, a three-dimensional rendering of a whole person rather than someone else in a packraft on the same river. A light drizzle sent us reluctantly to our shelters, and we slept like we’d earned it, for we had.

Toston Dam

Our final day of class and river started bright and clear. Breakfast was a delectable mueslix that was yummy enough I’ve since made it at home. We loaded up, consulted our maps, and pushed in. Travel had slowed with the flow of the river, and at about noon, we encountered a stretch that was so slow and still that hard paddling was required to make headway. Past submerged trees and bankside cows, we saw fish jumping and possibly a beaver or muskrat. Rounding a curve that we figured would narrow and speed things up, we instead encountered a dam, not anywhere near where we had expected it. That discovery finally explained our slow progress: we’d been paddling into a headwind on the lake formed by the dam!

The line on the map seemed clear enough though, despite us passing a similar line yesterday that was conspicuously dam-less, and rather than try our derring-do over the spillway, we pulled off and got out to explore, at one point getting close enough to a rattlesnake for him to coil and threaten anyone foolish enough to step within striking distance. We gave him a wide (and wide-eyed) berth. Despite growing up in eastern Montana, with rattlers common in the hills near my hometown, I had never seen a wild one before (though, to be fair, those in zoos can hardly be considered tame).

It turned out that the Toston Dam is a full three or four miles upstream of the small town of Toston, where we’d anticipated it. Since the shuttle wasn’t due for another four hours and none of us felt like waiting, the group decision was to portage around the dam and see what the last few miles held. This was a bit more exciting, since neither the instructors nor any of us had rafted this stretch, but the topo map made it clear that things were probably still pretty safe. Portaging was delightfully easy. The few hundred yards up and down a small hill were as simple as unstringing our loads and hoisting our rafts.

We got in, strapped on our helmets, admired the enormous American white pelicans trolling the tailwater for disoriented fish, and pushed off, making it to the Toston put-in/take-out in good time.

Black and Blue Burgers

A little post-class recon and an evaluation gave us time to think about the last three days, give feedback to the instructors, and watch Andy carefully pack everything into his backpack. He was leaving the next day for his big Alaska tramp and was subsequently peppered with questions about how he does what he does and tricks and tips for not going crazy in the solitude. Rob and I thought that just leaving everything there was a bit of a let-down, so we invited everyone over for burgers once they’d all showered up (we were all pretty ripe) and volunteered to bring a little something so long as it wasn’t Bud Light, which is not permitted in our home. It was fun to socialize a little more, give Andy a good home-cooked meal before he took off, and keep Mike in town for the night so he wasn’t driving back over mountain passes in the dark. Greg brought out another Swiss delicacy: elderflower cordial, which we thoroughly enjoyed after dinner.

It was a great way to cap a fun weekend. Cameraderie, boats, and lots of sun almost require a cold beer, tricked out burger, and happy laughter to complete the experience. I’m now plotting ways to sneak my friends and family in a packraft, and my son, Blake, has cheerfully requested that he come too. Perhaps being an armchair expert isn’t so useless after all!

Introduction

Yogi and Boo Boo have nothing on Sierra bears. Those Jellystone miscreants snagged a few unguarded picnic baskets with their clever schemes, but for athletic achievement and cunning, Yosemite bears – the superstars of Rancheria Falls, Tuolumne Meadows and Little Yosemite Valley – take all the awards. A bear’s incredible sense of smell and voracious appetite naturally lead him to wonderfully smelling, calorically dense human food. What would you eat if you had to spend the summer eating to survive a winter without food? A few berries, leaves, and grubs? Or a backpacker’s bag of Molasses Chews?

I’ve seen bears send cubs onto limbs too thin for a full-grown bear to go out on. I’ve seen them do full release dyno moves from tree to food bag. I once thought I had a bearproof hang, until mama carefully began testing branches to figure out which the food was hung from. Using the moonlight, she saw the food bag wiggle when she walked out onto my particular branch. When she started to chew on my slightly too thin hang branch, I spent the next half hour throwing rocks, yelling, and running to scare her to someone else’s camp. She spent much of the rest of the night unsuccessfully working on my better second food hang before wandering off with her twins (I typically split my hangs in high bear traffic areas such as Tuolumne Meadows).

In order to keep your food to yourself and to keep backcountry bears from becoming “problem bears” – that is to say, “dead bears” –  you’ve got to protect your food. Where bear hangs are allowed, an excellent bear hang goes a long way in protecting both your food and the bears. But… what constitutes an excellent bear hang? Rangers report that most backpackers can’t hang their food well enough to keep bears from getting it. Because of poor techniques, more and more Sierra Nevada wilderness areas prohibit hanging your food. For the lightweight backpacker, the inability to hang food – whether by personal limitation or mandate – means adding a minimum two pounds of bear canister to your lightweight load and subtracting $225 from your bank account. For a mere $80, you can get a canister just under three pounds, but no matter your choice, the weight penalty is severe.

If you consider the extra volume, weight, and durability of a pack needed to carry a canister, the net effect may be closer to three or four pounds, depending on your specific choices. Being required to contain all of your food in canisters makes longer, non-resupplied trips much more difficult. On longer trips, it may be hard to fit all of your food in a single canister and if two are required, well, you’d better be a superultralighter in everything else to bear the weight. Learn a few techniques, practice them to become proficient, and perhaps bear hanging will remain a viable option in most backcountry areas.

The Branch

Picking a bear hang starts with finding a tree with an appropriate branch. Fifteen feet up and five feet from the base of the tree is the minimum required, but with ursine acrobats, the higher the hang, the better. If you can hang your food from a limb thirty to fifty feet high, it’s much more risky for a bear to attempt. It also gives you the option of placing your food bag ten to fifteen feet below your hanging branch, which further confuses bears. If possible, pick a limb that really sticks out, is six inches in diameter at the attachment to the tree, and has multiple branches – preferably that obstruct a bear’s progress.

It’s best if your branch stands somewhat alone – it’s easier to keep the food away from other branches the bear could use, and it helps keep your food from getting stuck when retrieving it. It’s important to pick a branch too thick for a bear to break off, but to hang your rope far enough out on this branch that it won’t support a bear’s weight – even a cub’s. Ponderosa pines and ancient lodgepoles most frequently have branches that meet these criteria. Pick a live tree and branch for your hang, because dead wood, even when very thick, is much more brittle and easy for a bear to break. The rope is less likely to slip off of your branch if the branch tip turns up or if there are perpendicular side branches to catch the rope. You don’t want your rope to slide off of the branch should your adversary bend it while walking partway out.

If you’re at high elevation or in an area such as Colorado, dominated by spruce, it’s highly unlikely you’ll be able to find an appropriate single branch for a hang. In these circumstances/areas, the “double hang” technique can provide suitable protection. Pick two trees ten to twenty feet apart with branches at least fiteen feet from the ground. The side branches will likely reach only one to two feet from the trunk of the tree. Hang one side of the rope over the best branch available, then the other end over a branch on the other tree (you may also use two separate ropes). Tie your food bag in the middle (the figure of eight on a bight works well and unties easily). Pull up one rope leaving your food bag three to six feet from the top, then pull up the other rope so that the food bag is approximately half way between the trees. While less than ideal, this technique can provide pretty good protection.

The Rope

You should carry at least fifty of rope for hanging your food. Even with fifty feet, the perfect branch can be just out of reach, and I carry a minimum length of one hundred feet to maximize my hanging options. Your rope should be at least three millimeters thick and have a tightly woven sheath. Too thin, and you run the chance of it getting stuck by sawing into your branch. Too thick, and it’s heavy to carry and harder to throw up into the tree. Loosely woven ropes are prone to snags and getting stuck on branches.

Although Spectra ropes are amazingly strong for their weight, the extra strength isn’t usually needed (who’s going to carry one hundred pounds of food?) and can be a liability should your rope get stuck during the hanging process. If you snag a 300-pound test, you have a chance of breaking the rope and retrieving most of it. If you snag 600- to 1000-pound test, the rope is going to stay there for good. In this same vein, I generally leave the inevitable nicks that occur when the hanging rock lands on the end of the rope. If you have small nicks in your rope near the rock, you have a better chance of breaking the rope should it get stuck. However, you want to tie off your food bag above the nicks.

The Weight

Once you’ve picked your tree and branch, you’ve got to get your rope over the branch. If you try to throw the coiled rope over the branch, you’re likely to get only a tangled mess. You’ve got to have weight at the end of the rope. If there are rocks, or even a dense piece of wood, you can tie this to the end of your rope. Rectangular rocks are easier to attach and keep attached to your rope. Rounded river rocks often become independent projectiles. While this may be entertaining, there’s a clear risk of injury. Goliath is rumored to have met his end while David attempted to hang the Israelite’s food.

If you’re camping in areas without rocks, a small silnylon bag (preferably padded with a small piece of insulite or a dirty sock) can be filled with sand or pebbles and used as your rope weight. Whatever you choose to throw, pick your weight carefully. Lighter weights throw higher, but are difficult to retrieve from the branch. Heavier weights severely limit your throwing range.

The Throw

As pointed out earlier, the ability to hang your food high opens up options that help keep your food away from bears. Most people throw overhand style – like a baseball pitcher. However, even professional pitchers are rarely called on to strike out the man in the moon. Throwing upward is much more difficult than throwing forward. Generally, it’s hard to throw a rock more than twenty to twenty-five feet up with the overhand technique. However, using the “cowboy throw” a technique I have practiced since childhood, it is possible to reliably achieve heights of forty to fifty feet. This technique involves spinning the rope tied rock around in a counter-clockwise circle (clockwise for us lefties) and releasing the rope when the rock is on a trajectory to fly over your chosen branch. There is a learning curve to this technique, and your practice throws had better be far away from things you don’t want to break. However, once the it’s learned, there’s no throw that’s going to get your rope and food higher in a tree. You should still keep your backpack partner well out of range despite how impressive your hanging technique may be.

Since the highest hangs are achieved only with fairly light rocks, there may be some trouble getting the other end of the rope back to the ground. Whipping the end can assist when the rock won’t slide down by itself. It doesn’t always work: I’ve had to pull down otherwise “perfect” hangs when I couldn’t get the rock end of the rope back to earth.

The Hang

Once you have the rope over the branch and have retrieved both ends, there remain several choices to finish off your hang. Traditional teaching promotes the “counterbalance” technique, whereby two food bags of equal weight are made, one is pulled up partway into the tree, the second attached, and a stick or hiking pole is used to push the second up to the level of the first. This method relies on a perfect branch and finding a long stick to push the food up/down. The counterbalance method limits the height of your hang to the length of your reach extended by a stick or hiking pole. It is often difficult to fully equalize the weight of your food bags, and bears can shake the branch and gradually bring the heavier bag down without even getting near the rope. Counterbalancing also makes it more difficult to get the food up and down.

Because of these limitations, I prefer to pull my food up and tie off the rope to a second tree. If you use the “tie off” method, there are several wrinkles you need to know to maximally protect your food. First, walk back underneath the branch your food is hung over to shorten the angle of the hang and reduce the risk it could slip off the end of the branch.

Second, walk a long way away from the tree your food is hung from and have the rope hit the “tie off” tree above your head level. This limits the possibility that the bear might accidentally bump into your tie off rope. Choose a tie off tree that is flexible, or at least has some flexible side branches to reduce the risk that the bear could snap the rope. Bears have generally poor vision and probably can’t see the rope. However, they may accidentally bump into it and will swat at it with their paws. With thinner ropes, high friction hangs, or heavy food weights, consider wearing gloves or wrapping the rope around a stick to facilitate getting your food into the air. Speaking of friction, try to make sure that you wrap the tie off end around the tree so that your knot alone doesn’t take the weight of your hang bag. On cold mornings, having tied an easily broken stick in your figure of eight knot on the food bag end makes the knot at this end much easier to untie as well.

A variation to the tie off method involves feeding your pulling rope through a carabiner attached to your food bag. This both narrows the angle of the hang and allows you to pull your food further away from the tree. It’s pretty impressive to have your food thirty-five feet in the air, fifteen feet below the hanging branch and twenty to twenty-five feet from the trunk of the tree. What’s a bear going to do if he sees this hang? Walk to someone else’s camp or start digging for termites!

The “PCT method” is another variation that narrows the angle of the hang and doesn’t involve tying to a second tree. With this method, you tie a stick to the pulling rope as high as you can after you’ve pulled up the food. When you release the pulling rope, the food begins to slide down – until the stick you’ve tied wedges in the carabiner and jams its further descent. The free end of the pulling rope dangles below your hang until you pull it up in the morning to retrieve your stick, then retrieve your food. Bears can’t duplicate this delicate feat of dexterity, and the hanging rope is useless to them. This method allows a pretty good hang with a shorter rope, but doesn’t allow very good adjustments over final food placement.

More on bear bag hanging techniques can be found here.

Summary

A good bear hang is the crème fraîche on a cake and berry campsite. It serves as a conversation piece, a source of admiration, and can even improve your sleep. More importantly, it keeps you and your food safe from bears and bears safe from the ranger’s gun. Like nearly everything in life, little details can mean the difference between success and failure. A cheery breakfast greets you if you succeed, and a hungry hike points its finger back to your car if you don’t. Practice the techniques, learn the subtlety of rope, branch, tree, and throw and you’ll be rewarded with the satisfaction of a technique few can duplicate. Also satisfying: breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

Introduction

In learning to lighten my pack, I’ve also learned to better manage my finances. That might sound like a strange statement to make – generally speaking, lowering your base pack weight is associated with buying lighter gear. What I’ve learned, though, is to do more with less, and to buy only those things that will make a real difference to my base weight or in terms of practical use. I’ve learned to do more research before making purchases. I’ve learned that sometimes the best approach is to make something yourself – and yet, sometimes it makes more sense to pay someone else for their products. Sometimes it makes the most sense to make a sizable investment, and sometimes making that investment means saving up some money and not having the immediate gratification we seem to enjoy so much.

Pack Lighter, Pack Less

The most dramatic changes in lowering my base pack weight came from taking less stuff. It seems obvious enough… fewer things means less weight, just as fewer expenditures means less debt or less financial (instead of physical) strain. But getting to the point where I could leave things out of my pack meant wrapping my head around the concept of needs versus want. I found myself doing a cost-benefit analysis of the things that traditionally appear on my gear list: "I really like that jacket, but is it worth the extra twelve ounces it adds to my system? I mean, it’s nice to have, but the down vest is plenty warm." I was surprised not only by how little I needed, but by how little I missed once I got rid of it. And frankly, I was surprised by how unencumbered I felt by having fewer, more functional things on my back.

We all have different ideas about how to approach ultralight gear lists: how to budget the ounces and pounds we carry. We each prioritize categories differently. There are some things we’re just not willing or able to do without. If you’re unwilling to compromise or sacrifice in one area, though, you’ll likely have to make adjustments somewhere else to get to your target base weight. Ultralight backpacking, I’d argue, is ultimately about balance – balancing your budget of pounds and ounces.

If you wanted to design a house, at some point you’d have to adjust a sliding scale to reflect your needs and desires. Given a fixed budget, you can have a tiny house with incredible build quality and craftsmanship, or you can have a bigger house with lower-quality finishing. Designing the house means determining what you’re passionate about and what will suit your needs. Designing a low base pack weight requires the same sort of approach.

For example, I’m a side sleeper with a history of back and shoulder problems. There is no way you’ll find me on a thin closed-cell foam pad. I carry a thick self-inflator or a plush insulated air mattress instead. My sleeping pad weighs about two pounds versus the three-ounce micro-pads that some die-hards carry. Because I carry a heavier sleeping pad, I try to compensate for the "extra" weight by cutting weight somewhere else. I’ve been using a nineteen-ounce sleeping bag, for example, and just designed and made a fourteen-ounce sleeping bag. By comparison, many people carry sleeping bags that weigh twenty-eight or so ounces.

Making "Light" Affordable

Perhaps most importantly, ultralight backpacking has led me to take painstaking measurements and considerations for everything in my pack weight budget. I had to relearn, as well as reframe, my concept of "light," much as the process has taught me to re-evaluate my fiscal concept of "affordable." With the economy right now, the timing of my ultralight rebirth couldn’t have been better.

Perhaps the best illustration of my new found philosophy is my examination of the fire-starting items I’ve always packed. Lighters are tiny; they have essentially no mass. Matches are wispy little dried twigs. Having the ability to start fire can be vitally important. So traditionally I’ve carried a lighter in my pocket, one in my stove kit, one in my survival kit, and another one stashed somewhere in the bowels of my pack. I would also have two or three lightweight plastic bottles stuffed with matches and a striker pad. Once I got serious about lowering my base weight I bought a digital scale and started weighing every single item that could end up in my pack. Each lighter, I found, weighed about 0.75 ounces – next to nothing! Each filled match safe weighed only about an ounce. Again, the weight seems inconsequential. But then, I tallied up the total weight of my firestarters: four lighters at 0.75 ounce equalled 3 ounces. Three match safes at an ounce each weighed 3 ounces. I had 6 ounces of firestarting stuff in my pack – over a third of a pound! I grimaced at the thought of the flint and steel still stashed in my possibles bag.

Discovering that I had about half a pound (once I added the flint and steel) of firestarting stuff in my pack was… profound. It was a moment of clarity that has stayed with me. It led to a paradigm shift in my worldview: even teeny tiny things add up to be very significant.

Happiness is…

Since then, I’ve become a bit obsessed about weight. I know how much most of my gear (and much of the gear I’ve considered buying) weighs to the tenth, if not hundredth, of an ounce. Not because I want the absolute lowest possible pack weight, but because I want the lowest possible pack weight that keeps me happy. I now take just enough clothing to keep me warm, dry, and comfy without having a number of extra layering options. I no longer have enough spare clothing to make a decent pillow, so I’m playing with the most flexible options to add a few usable ounces to the pack. (I have a down pillow that weighs 4.5 ounces; when I realized that the 3.5 ounces of down in it was the same amount of down insulating my vest, I ditched the pillow as a possibility. I just made a Climashield vest that weighs 3 ounces total; it should be just enough for my new "pillow," too.

The rest of my life has come under closer inspection since I started thinking about my gear list in a more cognizant way. Money started to make more sense to me, became more tangible. The scale of my life came into better focus. In the grander scheme of things, five bucks for a sandwich at lunch isn’t much. And the buck and a quarter for my once or twice daily coffee refill isn’t significant – barely registers on the financial scale. And my afternoon snack of a buck or two is really pretty cheap. And if I spend another buck or two on a drink later in the day, well, it’s only a buck or two… right? My new-found ultralight perspective helped me realize that, hey, in my life, those inconsequential food purchases added up to ten or twelve dollars every day. Working four days a week, I was realistically spending about fifty dollars each week, two hundred dollars a month, two thousand four hundred dollars a year on "cheap" filler food.

If I were making $100,000 a year, maybe two hundred dollars a month wouldn’t be all that much. What I’ve come to realize, though, is that I don’t earn that kind of money. I have been living on the wrong scale. I hadn’t been living in reality. I hadn’t been paying attention to how quickly all those little things add up and was nickel and diming my budget to pieces. I’ve learned to live with a scale more appropriate to my budget – and last month, I had an extra hundred and twenty dollars in the bank and two pounds less in my pack.

Introduction

The literal translation of the Japanese word ‘Tenkara’ is ‘from Heaven.’ If Heaven’s character is defined by elegance, grace, and simplicity, then Tenkara fly rods may indeed be Heaven’s answer for backcountry fly fishing enthusiasts passionate about ultralight gear and style.

Ryan’s Tenkara Gear

• Tenkara Ayu (3.5 oz) or Tenkara Iwana Rod (2.3 oz)
• Simblissity Unslack Pack, modified for lanyard use (0.7 oz)
• 10.5′ Braided Tenkara Leader on Tippet Spool
• 30M 5X Frog Hair Tippet on Spool (I sometimes add a spool of 6X and/or 7X as well)
• Hydrophobe Floatant in Small Squeeze Tube
• Yarn Strike Indicator
• MicroDrop Bottle with Qty 16 Split Shot
• Morell Small Foam Fly Box (includes weight of four dozen flies)
• MicroZip Bag with Fishing License

Total Weight of Kit: 5 to 6 ounces

The Movie

A short introduction to what Tenkara is all about, including some fish-catching footage and expository comments from the South Fork of the Flathead River in the Bob Marshall Wilderness.

Resources

Learn about Tenkara at Wikipedia.

Read Tenkara feedback at Twitter.

Read the author’s blog posts about Tenkara: Post 1, Post 2.