Has UL backpacking changed the way you live?

Not really … yet. I had a goal of doing the long trails in about 10 years from now (when my disco days are presumably over) so there's a paring down and replacing .. probably more about all sorts of technology and eBaying household items.

On a household level, it's more how I want to spend my money and time, ditto for other people spend their time. … as most of us have limited resources IMHO.

As to the bigger picture, hikers probably all want more public land and/or public access. There are competing interests however and sometimes they win. That's why there are organizations to join …

ed: clar/add/emph

If you search the forums you will find this has been discussed before…probably more than you want to read. ;)

No.

I have 3 kids. Ain't going to happen. And both of us work from home. We upgraded this week to a bigger home, we had been 10 years in a much smaller home, when it was only one kid and us and neither of us worked from home. Yet, now I live 2 blocks from shopping, my house backs up to a rail to trail and I don't need to drive, unless I want to.

Thing is..by "selling out" I can enjoy staring at that trail all day long ;-)

Sure, it has changed the way I pack for my business trips. I fly about 100,000-150,000 miles a year, and I take fewer things, and lighter things.

But I'm not sure that wouldn't have happened anyway.

I fly somewhat less than Paul, but yeah, that's the biggest difference I notice day-to-day. Some of the UL gear just makes it easier to pack small and light. More so, the techniques (wash your UW each night) and philosophies (don't bring "just-in-case" stuff) help keep the load small and light. I rarely have carry-on roller or checked bags if I go for 2 or 3 days – everything fits in a carry-on daypack. Some day, I'll do an overnight business trip with NO luggage – a smart phone, wallet, and mini-toothbrush in my pockets.

The one way UL has ADDED to my luggage, is I'll often travel with a 10-ounce Thermarest. I'm often waiting in ANC for 4-5 hours for the first flight the next morning and sometimes have gotten stuck due to weather or mechanical reasons. Departure lounge benches and carpeted floors are a LOT better for sleeping on with a pad.

On the outdoor front, more UL gear and techniques have enabled us to take our young children backpacking earlier and further out than we could have with traditional gear.

Actually I found UL backpacking in my quest to unload all the clutter from my everyday life.

Check out this 100-things challenge (which is where this all started for me):
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1812048,00.html

I've posted on this before. It's a whole movement…and it's awesome. My next step is renting a studio apartment here in Austin. I'm currently living with my brother, and I did have to buy a car (boo…), but I'm getting there! The guy who is renting my condo in Chicago (that I finally sold!!! yeah!!!) is buying most of my stuff…the rest is going to salvation army.

I'm getting there, and wow is it freeing!!!!

Jennifer,

Nice! I'll check this out when I get some more time.

I've noticed when most people I know go out, the hiking is second to the camping, which is second to the stuff – hauling it, setting it up, organizing it, cleaning it.

Eventually for me, the series reversed. Most of my time was spent hiking, camping was second, and the stuff came last. (Which is partly why I joined this site.) Last weekend, I had camp set up in much less than 10 minutes (didn't time it) and it sometimes feels weird when setting up camp is no longer an event.

Then I'm thinking, how can it be so easy out here, and yet 20 hrs of my normal week is spent cleaning and organizing a house? How can 3 kids generate 5 loads of laundry in a week? Something's got to give! :)

I think the lack of control in normal life is partly what pushed me back into getting out, which has in turn led me to re-evaluate the way I'm navigating normal life.

On a different note, I have renamed our boys Destructor, Chaos & Mayhem. :)

Like Paul and Dave discussed, my journey to UL started with traveling. I hate checking bags so I started looking at what I brought with me and how I could get it all to fit in a single carry-on day pack and the occasional personal item (DSLR/laptop). I started packing clothes that I could wash in the sink or bathtub which would air-dry by the next day. I found not having to carry multiple suitcases to be liberating and I started looking at how I could apply this to other areas in my life. I found UL backpacking a few years after traveling like this and it was a perfect fit.

Although I've reduced my wardrobe to a third of what it used to be, I keep looking at ways to reduce it further. I have to give a shout-out to Jennifer as the 100 Things Challenge looks like fun and I think I'll try to take that on. Fortunately I have kids so I can fudge the numbers when it comes to my surplus of stoves/pots by throwing them into their backpacks ;)

Now do the kids count as one thing in the list, or do you have to count them individually? :-)

I have too many books (don't ask!) and I have had a really hard time even thinking about getting rid of any of them, even though I feel this is an issue for me. It is especially an issue whenever I move! As direct an analogy with the issues of UL as can be imagined. I guess everybody has stuff it is very hard to give up, even if there isn't much of a rational reason. Some of them are like photos of long lost friends to me. If I had to count them individually as one of the 100 thing I'd be doomed.

http://zenhabits.net/minimalist-fun-the-100-things-challenge/

From one of my favorite bloggers

"Things not included:
•Stuff that’s shared between him and other family members.
•Non-personal stuff, like dishes, cleaning supplies, etc.
•Books.
•Tools.
•Collections count as one item."

So for me, I'm counting my camera, lenses, chargers, and other accessories as a single item. Same for CDs as I won't even try to get my collection under 1000 although I could organize them better. BLUF, life enriching items like art supplies, music, outdoor gear will probably get lumped together as a single item while a circa 1985ish David Lee Roth Eat 'Em and Smile concert shirt may find its way to the garbage bin (but not without some wailing and gnashing of teeth).

Mark,

I feel your pain my friend. My condo STILL has an entire floor to ceiling, wall to wall set of bookshelves full of my favorite books.

That 100-things challenge is what drove me to buy an e-reader – those books, as much as I love love love them, were literally weighing me down. they cost so much to move, took up so much space…and they were just books.

Yes, I love the feel of a quality book, with the ragged pages, the smell of the paper and the ink, ah……….

But it's a thing. What is important is the story, the words the author is conveying, the ideas. Those I could get from the – gasp – e-reader. I hated doing it at first, but it was the first bandaid i ripped off and it was sooooooo freeing. Honestly, once I did that one (the hardest), the rest has actually been rather easy. So my tenant is buying my bookshelves when he moves out and the books are going to the salvation army. I took the few that truly meant something to me (autographed, note handwritten inside, first editions, etc) and the rest I just left behind. I refuse to even look at what's there……..

Hmm… probably shouldn't count them as a collection but that'll leave me with, at most, 90 items left. This is going to be tougher than I originally thought.

I think if you put them in a box it will count as a collection, no? Now the big question – is our backpacking gear a collection? Yikes!

I'm glad books aren't explicitly included, but if there is ever a weight condition I'm back to being doomed. I have had big burly movers, guys that move refrigerators and pianos every day as part of their job give me the evil eye when it came to packing up my books for a move.

I'm working on consuming my pulpier reading now on my kindle so that is something. Having the digital NYT for the past half decade probably has saved a least a smallish tree by now.

For me personally I would say yes.

Butt!!!!! In the last 6 years I have moved from Ireland to Belgium to the US and each time we end up with more junk.

My mom still sends me a huge box of stuff for my birthday, and for Christmas. This is a ritual going back to when she got divorced from my father when I was 13. However the ritual is now (and has been for a few decades) entirely divorced from reality. I know she like to do this so I don't bug her about it. Every time each box include several item of clothes there is no way in hell I would ever wear. In fact I have told her since I was 16 that the proper way for her to shop for me was to find something she thinks I would like, and then buy the exact opposite. Still I have this complex about sending them direct to good will.

The care packages also contain tons of candles (she found out we had extended power failures here in the winter sometimes), the tackier the better. Preferably in the shape of some animal with a funky scent. Also, figurines, often of birds since she knows I like (real) birds. But she has inexplicably moved on to sending elk and deer now as well – a troubling development. I have tried to explain that I am a guy not a little old lady, and that at any rate if I was to have figurines they would at least need to have some significance to me personally, and not just picked up by someone else at a yard sale. It never works. Always, and I really mean that, there is exactly one of these figurines broken when it arrives. For chaos it is remarkably consistent. Lastly some item of junk food in plastic packaging that were clearly manufacture more than a decade in the past. Does Goodwill sell food items? Bags of mints are popular for some reason.

How should I deal with this stuff? Do I have permission to take it to Goodwill (from whence much of it probably came in the first place since my mom loves them) right away? If the 100 things approach allows this then I am in! Or is there some proper time I should hold the stuff to acknowledge the spirit of my mom's gifts?

Where is dear Abbey when I need her?

Sounds like your mom is a bit like mine was, Marko. :) I have to say I'd give pretty much anything to get one of those tacky packages from her today…but then it would go straight to Goodwill anyway.

I hereby absolve you of the need to hang on to your mom's gifts beyond your thank-you note/call/whatever for them (unless she comes to visit, in which case you may need to have a few on display!).

I believe the way to deal with stuff like this, or other sentimental things, is to take a digital photo of them. Ta-da! You have the memory, but not the thing.

Thread drift alert but since it involves Abba it's ok.

1980 we loaded our Mercury station wagon and moved from Florida to Washington State. While a long drive to begin with, my parents took the scenic route. I have many fond memories of that trip and some not so nice ones of my legs becoming welded to the vinyl seats and that the only two cassettes my parents owned were some Don Williams (Tulsa Time?) album and Abba's Voulez Vous. I'm sure they were lovely the first 1000 times we listened to them but somewhere east of the Mississippi, the music transformed into a personal Hell for me (seriously… imagine "voulez-vous (ah-ha)Take it now or leave it (ah-ha)Now is all we get (ah-ha)Nothing promised, no regrets Voulez-vous (ah-ha)" for > 3000 miles.)

Anywho… 1992ish I find myself in the Nurnberg PX and Abba has just released a greatest hits CD. I buy it for yucks and casually mention it to my mom during a call home. Christmas comes and she sends me the biggest, baddest Abba box set known to man complete with a book and more Swedish nonsense than you can shake a stick at.

You'd think it'd stop there but no… its legacy lives on. I actually loaded the CDs into iTunes and the iMac is in the same room as our Apple TV. As you can guess, if I forget to log out of the mac and use the remote to surf Netflix, the Mac starts blasting Dancing Queen.

So for me, Swedish Pop is the ever-present reminder of how wonderful my mom is, not that the reminder is needed. Fortunately I’ve already decided that my music collection will be one item so it’s only fair that your care package figurines are treated the same way.

You may now return to your regularly scheduled program.

That is awesome!

>"I have too many books . . . It is especially an issue whenever I move! "

A geologist co-worker explained why he always had to be making new friends. See, geologists like rocks. And collect them. And never throw them out. So no one EVER helps them move their stuff a second time.

>" "voulez-vous (ah-ha)Take it now or leave it (ah-ha)Now is all we get (ah-ha)Nothing promised, no regrets Voulez-vous (ah-ha)" for > 3000 miles.) "

A friend up here loaned his truck to a guy. The guy played a cassette in the radio. It got stuck. Pre-empting the radio as well. No one's fault, it just happened. But it was a combo music-mix tape and spoken love letter from a hippie dog musher to his then long-distance girlfriend. Years later, it was still stuck in there. We all learned to just not turn on the tunes.

"and more Swedish nonsense than you can shake a stick at. "

I think you meant shake a schtick at…..

"I think you meant shake a schtick at….."

Vhet zee fork ves I theenking?

On another note… did you know there is a Swedish Chef translator? I didn't until a few moments ago.

Have that type of stuff shipped to work. Then don't bring it home. My wife's work has a "give away" table for all those unloved items. One mans junk…

Ian's hot for Agnetha.