Carry On regulated Multi day pack?

I have a Columbia panel loader and a Mountain Laurel Designs Prophet that I use as my carry-on. If I'm going to do any real hiking, I bring the MLD pack. If I'm just doing the urban backpacking thing, I bring the Columbia pack as it keeps things more secure as I'm loading/unloading from trains, planes, boats, whatever where I don't need to worry about stuff falling out of the front or side pockets.

I'd go with a framless pack and just make sure you can smoosh it into the dimensions they require. I'm bringing my Columbia backpack overseas next month and it will be my one and only bag for a week while I'm there. I started traveling UL and then transitioned to UL backpacking later on.

If I think I'm going to bring back souvenirs, I'll either bring or buy on location a lightweight duffle bag that easy to compress when empty but sturdy enough to check on the flight home.

You might want to check with the airline. Although most of them are standardized for carry-on bag dimensions, some of them are outside of the standard. Also, even if your bag fits the allowed dimensions for a particular airline, they can take one look at it and decide that it has to be checked. I've run into that problem on one airline. I objected to it being checked (because it had a lot of expensive camera gear inside the bag) and showed them that it would fit into their dimensional frame for carry-on.

–B.G.–

Someone needs to make an UL airline pack.

If you are going to be day hiking, get a cheap suitcase of the right dimensions at a thrift store and take a small UL frameless day pack as your "personal" bag. Or put a frameless pack flat in the suitcase.

For a single round trip from CA to HI, you don't need much in the way of luggage. For that matter, I could happily do the trip with a simple 24 liter and a 35 liter would be luxurious. 50 liters is way overkill; FYI, a typical maximum size carry-on convertible suitcase/backpack is about 2500ci/40L.

Tee shirts, short and sandals don't take much room! Heck, if I left town wearing shorts, aloha shirt and my Keen sandals, I could do it with a Flash 18. Hawaii is a very informal place. If you run out of clean clothes, there are cheap tourist tees and aloha shirts all over. If I didn't need a backpack, I could do the trip with a shopping bag!

I took a carry-on convertible suitcase/backpack for a 3 week trip to Europe in the dead of winter with a full 35mm camera system. I got on the plane wearing an extra layer of clothing :)

Go to Maui :)

Agree with Bob, I would stick to the airline dimensions. The last few years we have noticed crew members patience running thin (and rightfully so) with folks trying to smash over sized luggage in the bins. Especially when the bins fill up and your holding up the line they will threaten to check your carry on. We carry all our expensive gear in about 40L packs and have had no problems.

And at the same time I swear the bins on our last flight were smaller depth wise than usual. Less weight, less fuel more profit.

Sounds like some powers to be would like to see a no carry on policy. So far Homeland security has pushed back.

jimmyb

Despite the trouble that this entails, you want to keep as much of your stuff with you in the cabin as is legal and practical. If some airline person looks at your carry-on pack and decides that it looks too much like a backpack, then they might demand to "gate check" it into the cargo hold. But if they do that, you better make sure that they get the correct destination marked on the bag.

One time an airline gate checked my bag to the first destination stop for that flight, but the rest of my stuff was checked to a different final destination. It gets very complicated from there on.

One thing to watch out for in Hawaii has to do with water. Sometimes backpackers want to hike up one of the volcanoes and camp out. The problem is that there is Zero or nearly Zero running water on the volcanoes. I was going to be up on one of them for four days, so I had to carry four gallons of water in my backpack. You do the math.

–B.G.–