can’t search

This is not a direct answer to your question but maybe will give you a lead. I use the Firefox browser with "Ghostery", an anti-tracker. Ghostery must be disabled for the search to work. With Ghostery enabled I see the never-ending "loading".

Do the search the old way.

http://www.backpackinglight.com/cgi-bin/backpackinglight/forums/search?

…or use google with http://www.backpackinglight.com as a qualifier.

That way you can use the "Any Time" function to limit the search to the past year (versus 10 years), to avoid 20,000 worthless hits.

To restrict your search to a particular web site, this syntax works on Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo:

site:backpackinglight.com words to search for

Note that dropping the "www." will search web sites where some content is on randomly named servers (not a BPL problem).

— Rex