This fall, my wife and I will be doing a two week backpack/packraft trip in Idaho. We’ve done three other such trips, all two weeks in length and done in late September/early October. We typically packraft 5-6 days of the trip and backpack the rest. We limit our packrafting to Class 3 or less (Middle Fork and Main Salmon) with moderately cold water and air temps sometimes in the 50s. So not cold by some standards, but cold and splashy enough that if it’s raining or you swim, you’re not that happy.
We’ve always struggled with what to wear packrafting on these trips. Even with a resupply mid-trip, it’s still a struggle to keep our pack weights down. What we’ve worn on previous trips are Kokatat dry pants with socks (around a pound per pair) with an ultralight rain jacket. This protects from some splashes, but in a swim you’re going to get wet. I’ve only swam once on one of these trips, but the temps were in the mid 50s and raining – it wasn’t all that fun and I spent the night around a campfire trying to dry out. We’ve become conservative about what we’ll run vs portage, especially if the weather is cold, which takes a little of the fun out of packrafting. So far we haven’t tried drysuits – seems like the lightest you can find these days is +/- 2.5 pounds and the thought of carrying one is painful. Personally, I couldn’t hike in a drysuit with the top up, so I’d also need to bring a rain jacket. Maybe with the top rolled down, it would be ok as rain pants.
I’m not sure there are any magic bullet answers here, but I’d be curious what’s worked for folks on similar trips. Researching on the web, most folks seem to go with a dry suit, but I wonder how many are packing these significant distances. I haven’t found any superlight drysuits since Alpacka stopped making them. The Anfibio suits look interesting and somewhat light, but are hard to order from the U.S. and a somewhat unknown commodity. I’ve considered adding a dry top, but seems like the combined weight of a dry top and pants approaches a dry suit.
Seems like the market would support more specialized packrafting clothing – but maybe I’m delirious.
