Nothing New Under the Sun?

"Really I'd emphasize ridding of the need for gear, rather than lightening the gear."

Well said. Where I hike I don't need water purification or bear/monkey protection. Cleaning up the water supplies and killing the bears in your area may lighten your load considerably! We also have a good smattering of huts all over the country, which allow me to leave tent and mat at home, and in some huts even cooking facilities are supplied. It's the best of UL if you can stand sharing a room with a bunch of drinking/partying/snoring people you don't know…

Someone else had posted about spider silk so I thought you guys might find this interesting

http://www.gadling.com/2007/12/12/big-in-japan-spider-silk-socks-warm-the-toes-and-sooth-the-soul/

I am personally happy that I can finally buy something without having to worry about the 4oz lighter version to come out 2 days later.

If you think of UL backpacking purely in terms of weight savings, then most of the big improvements have already been made. You can't shave another 5lbs off your pack if you're already switched from a 6 lbs pack to a 1 lbs one. If you think in terms of just weight savings then the future of UL is dimishing returns and gradual refinement that leads to better products but not very many radical new ones.

However, I think the idea behind UL backpacking applies to more than just weight. The real goal behind all of this is to make outdoor recreation more enjoyable. Shaving off pounds has certainly done this and there are other ways you can also achieve this.

In addition to a low pack weight, other things that can make hiking more enjoyable are better nutrition, better tasting foods, higher performing footwear, using solor energy for electronics and maybe cooking, better fabrics that are more comfortable etc.

Another avenue UL hiking could go down is the shift to relying on the wild for food. We already rely on the hiking area for water and it's possible we'd see a shift to decrease our food reliance on packed in foods, and move it towards harvested ones. Fishing is an obvious one, but there is so much more. Edible plants is a huge topic and one that most backpackers don't even start to explore. Making your own tea in the wilderness (labrador tea), finding mushrooms to eat (dangerous), eating plants etc has huge potential for weight savings. With UL and SUL kits, the majority of your weight can be food.

The challenge with this though is keeping it sustainable.

"Another avenue UL hiking could go down is the shift to relying on the wild for food. We already rely on the hiking area for water and it's possible we'd see a shift to decrease our food reliance on packed in foods, and move it towards harvested ones. Fishing is an obvious one, but there is so much more. Edible plants is a huge topic and one that most backpackers don't even start to explore. Making your own tea in the wilderness (labrador tea), finding mushrooms to eat (dangerous), eating plants etc has huge potential for weight savings. With UL and SUL kits, the majority of your weight can be food."

It's pretty difficult to get enough calories to sustain you for very long in most wilderness areas, unless you start killing animals. Especially if you want to do anything much beyond hunting/gathering. Pretty much the challenge confronting our early ancestors, a constant search for enough food to stay alive.

"The challenge with this though is keeping it sustainable."

Precisely why this should not be encouraged, at least in wilderness areas and NP's.

Wearing a flame retardant suit there Dan?

Keep in mind I'm not suggesting an immediate switch to 100% reliance on the wilderness for food which I realize is extremely difficult and unsustainable. Simple stuff like gathering blueberries for pancakes, making labradour tea (or cedar tea) etc are all simply things you can do add a bit of luxury and/or save weight. These are things that can be done as a fun activity around camp in the evenings….even planning fresh fish as one meal is fairly easy if you don't mind bringing your gear. Worse case scenario you just miss one meal. I think this is the kind of thing you just gotta start small and slowly increase as your skill does. There are so many edible plants if you have the knowlege to know when, where and how to find them.

This kinda stuff wouldn't work in popular areas, but for the backpacker who is really getting out there into the middle of nowhere it could be sustainable and by starting small you can keep the effort level to a comfortable one.

We often gather *small* amounts of fresh greens (watercress, sea lettuce etc…), fish and berries to add colour and flavour to our meals. Beyond that I think it's not practical from either a time or environmental point of view to rely on wild foods.

Actually, I take back the environmental argument to a certain extent in NZ. There are many official pest animals that it would be environmetally friendly to rely on. These include some tasty animals such as deer, pigs, possums and rabbits, but carrying a high powered rifle and big knife is not my idea of UL, plus hunting, snaring and butchery take a lot of time. Of course, so does fishing, but I enjoy fishing for it's own sake as much as for the food it might provide.

I think cat tails are an interesting potential food source. I'm fuzzy on this, but I think you can eat the green part of the young plants and you can make sort of flour from the roots of the older ones. I believe some people make biscuits and pancakes based on this.

Like Lynn said, it's gotta be something you enjoy though because all of this stuff is time consuming.

Didnt read every post but…

Biomimicry:

http://brainz.org/15-coolest-cases-biomimicry/

Havent read it but: http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/sustainable-sex/book-review-biomimicry-innovation-inspired-by-nature-by-janine-m.-benyus

I want instant beer that uses incredibly cold spring water from the mountains, no muss, no fuss, no added equipment, just mix and smile…. :)

This might be vaporware, but I am hopeful.

Pat’s BackCountry Beer

One issue is the availability of materials. Let's look at tents, for instance. the lighter shelter options now on the market, such as the Zpacks Hexamid or a Cuben tarp from Oware, are at the limits of the available materials. Excess "features" have been eliminated and the sizes reduced about as far as is practical. So until lighter fabrics come along, not much room for weight reduction. And the problem is that the fabrics are not developed for backpacking gear. We are just an ancillary market. I can't think of any fabric developed specifically for tents. All the tent fabrics that I am aware of are either variants of fabrics developed for clothing (Goretex, eVent, EPIC, as examples) or sails and hot air balloons and parachutes (silnylon, spinnaker cloth, Cuben). So new materials for the backpacking gear market are dependent on developments for other markets.
Once we push our gear weights down to the limits of the currently available fabrics, we have to wait for someone to develop a new, lighter fabric for some other use which we can then adopt. The UL backpacking gear market alone is apparently not large enough to make developing fabrics specifically for it a rewarding investment.
Some kinds of gear have not hit this point yet – for instance, anyone with a little imagination can see how an inverted canister stove could be made a good bit lighter than anything currently on the market – and we've seen a few ideas in that direction as modifications of existing stoves on the MYOG forum.
Unfortunately, the "Big 3" – sleeping system, pack, tent – (which make up a large part of anyone's base weight) are all getting pretty close to the limits of currently available materials. So big jumps just aren't possible – for now.