When I first started backpacking………

[Jon Fong / Flat Cat Gear]

After reading “Getting 2 Friends Outside of Their Comfort Zone”, it got me thinking about the flip side: my first backpacking trips. While many of us have a significant number of miles under our soles, a fair number of readers are new to the site and are just getting up the learning curve. To expedite this and to show that we all learning as we get more experience, I thought it would be fun, helpful and humbling to share decisions that we made when we were first starting out.

Here are a few of my stories. My wife and I decided to hike the Grand Canyon South Rim-Indian Garden -Bright Angel and return (mid-1980’s). I bought hiking boots for my wife to break in before the trip months before the trip. Being busy, she didn’t have time to break them in. On the hike down, she decided to wear her Reebok aerobic shoes. Those of you who are unfamiliar with this shoe, it has a flat bottom with a minimal tread and no support whatsoever. She slip / slide down the trail and by Indian Garden, her toes and calves were cramping. The next day, we limped into the Bright Angel and bought tubes of Bengay and Tylenol : no, we didn’t have a first aid kit. We rested a day at the bottom and slowly climbed back out.

[Glen L]

That sounds familiar Jon. Lol

I’m new to the site but have read the posts for at least ten years. My first foray into backpacking was at age twelve with a Korean War surplus rucksack that cost me 10¢ and a woolen blanket covered by some canvas tarp that was blanket pinned by my mother. It was not my first solo overnight trip. That happened when I was four years old without permission. So from previous experience I knew that navigating was very important. I sat down and wrote the county a request for topo maps of a prescribed area and told them I was twelve years old and a big boy now. They sent me three fresh 7.5’ USGS quads that fascinated me to no end so much so that my career spanning three decades was as an aerial mapping photographer. That job facilitated many adventures of rucksack travel both during that work travel and the time off when girlfriend always came along.

[Victor Jorgensen]

Age 14 in 1973, I was wearing Levis and converse tennis shoes to hike down Coyote Gulch, Utah.  I prepared myself with a bunch of strike anywhere kitchen matches in my front pocket.  A few miles down the trail a pretty rock caught my eye, and was added to the same pocket.  It didn’t take long to see a puff of smoke, and do a little dance to empty my smoldering pocket.  Now, I am grateful for Bic lighters.

[Bill Budney]

We had reservations that night at Phantom Ranch, but arrived at the (Grand Canyon) South Rim late in the day. It was raining, so I stopped at the store and got ziplock bags to keep our clothes dry. Having never really needed a light, I got a cheap flashlight “just in case”. Checked in with the ranger and proceeded down the (shorter) Kaibob Trail.

The Sun set and the clouds rolled in, below the rim. Not one bit of light from stars or moon penetrated the clouds. It was so dark I literally couldn’t see my hand in front of my face.

I gave the flashlight to my wife and showed her the old Boy Scout trick of preserving the battery by shining the light on the trail, turning it off, proceeding, then repeat. If the battery ran out then we would just have to sit down on the trail and wait for dawn. In the rain.

So I followed this flashing firefly down the trail, fortunately stumbling only occasionally.

We got some surprised looks at Phantom Ranch, but the rest of the evening was uneventful.

Everything worked out on that trip, but now I don’t go anywhere without at least two lights. Headlamp for the trail, and a zoomable flashlight for spotting trail markers in the distance.

[Paul Wagner]

Second trip, when I was still in high school, a friend and I hiked up over Avalanche Pass in Kings Canyon and spent a week fishing up by Colby Lake. We were using tube tents and cheap Dacron II bags, and it got cold enough to freeze our water bottles solid.  Needless to say, we hightailed out of there after a morning of stamping our feet and slapping our arms to try to warm up in the sun.

We still had a great time.

[Kevin Babione]

I love this thread…as a kid I had taken two one-week backpacking trips (1977 & 1979) with the summer camp I used to go to.  External frame pack from K-Mart, Army Surplus Jungle Boots for footwear, Army aluminum canteens for water storage.  While I did a bunch of car camping over the next 26 years, I hadn’t been backpacking since.  My daughter, 16 at the time, expressed an interest so we planned to do the West Rim Trail in PA in early June 2005.

I wish I could call my issues “Rookie Mistakes,” but I’ve never seen a rookie who could have considered making all of the errors I did!  A few highlights:

• Backpacks:  I had an Arc’teryx Bora 80 for me and a Bora 62 (Women’s) for my daughter.  You know what’s wrong with packs that size?  You fill them!  Mine weighed over 7 pounds empty and Carly’s was close to that.
• We already had great Sierra Designs 10-degree sleeping bags so we took those (during a heat wave when daytime temps were in the 90’s and it got down into the mid-70’s at night).  So what if they were more than 5 lbs each?  It was so hot we never unzipped them – we just laid on top of them when we slept.
• Right before we went I bought a Mountain Hardware PCT-2 tent instead of taking our SD Comet 3-person tent.  So my tent weight dropped from 11 to 7 pounds.
• Water?  We EACH started the hike with a full 3-liter Camelbak AND 2 full 1-liter Nalgenes each – on a trail where you crossed a stream approximately every 2 miles.  I cannot imagine there’s a trail in PA where you need to carry 11 pounds of water.
• Food & Cooking?  All freeze-dried (including dessert for each night) for each of the four days we were planning to be out PLUS an additional day’s worth of food in case we didn’t like something.  We were each carrying a couple pounds of snacks!  I was using an Optimus Nova white gas stove and packed 1.7 liters of fuel!  I had never used the stove before and wasn’t sure how much gas it used…
• Clothing?  We each packed 3 full changes of clothing plus sleeping wear.
• Extras?  Thermarest chairs (2), hammocks (2), inflatable pillows (2), an 8×10 tarp in case it rained, Crocs for in camp, large Sven saw, you get the picture.

I’m sure my pack weighed close to 70 pounds when we started and hers must have been almost 50.  It was absolutely insane.  Some photos:

Starting our hike we were all smiles…

After 6 miles we both felt like this:

Don’t try using a new stove for the first time indoors…

We spent two nights on the trail and covered about 15 miles in total when we decided to bail.  We were having a good time except when we were carrying our packs.  In 2006 we lightened our loads (me down to the 40’s and hers into the upper-20’s) and finished the trail in 3 days.  I continued to drop weight from my pack and now my total pack weight rarely goes much above 22-24 pounds, but that took a lot of reading BPL and other sources and a bunch of new gear.

One note to rookies reading this…Post your planned trip and see if someone on BPL who has some experience might be able to come along so you can simply watch what they do.  You’ll learn a lot and I’m sure they’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have.

[dirtbag]

Hahaa.. wow.. .

Ummm… “One note to rookies reading this…Post your planned trip and see if someone on BPL who has some experience might be able to come along so you can simply watch what they do.  You’ll learn a lot and I’m sure they’ll be happy to answer any questions you might have”…

Just dont go with me!!!  I’ve been told im not that nice and very condescending!!

[Kevin Babione]

OMG – I just happened to notice on the photo of the back of my pack…That device hanging on the right side is my BACKUP GPS!!!  My “primary” is a Garmin GPSMap72C (I think) and I have it clipped to my shoulder strap in front.  The “backup” was my first GPS – a Garmin Geko 201.  I’m sure I had plenty of batteries for both units!

@Dirtbag – I don’t think you’ll have to worry about a rookie hitting you up to go out…

[Thom]

Boy Scouts freezing in winter and happy to b in church on Sunday  to warm up!  USMC humping with a  prc77.   Loving ultralight now.

thom

[Dustin V]

I was lucky that the wilderness started at the end of the cup-de-sac, at the time. Looking back, I’m surprised I kept going back out, carrying surplus gear, waffle-stomper boots and dim Radio Shack flashlights. There was a lot of type-2 fun and I’m surprised we all escaped with minor scars. No one was sprayed by skunks, gored by bison or hunted by cats. We packed the usual fears with us: big knives, third pair of blue-jeans…

Somewhere along the line that transferred into my first jobs, doing trail and general maintenance. Carrying a 15# rock bar or a box of spikes a few miles down the trail gave me time to think about carrying better and lighter gear.

[Mark Verber]

My first trips were with my dad in the early 1970s. He was a light weight style packer. All my experiences with my dad were wonderful, and got me over the unpleasant trips with others :)

Happiness memory was one of our earliest trips in Big Horns.  I think the first day was an 8 mile hike to Adelaide Lake which was long enough to feel like I accomplished something carrying a 14lb pack, but not so much that I was exhausted. Sitting next to my dad on a foam pad, my legs covered by a sleeping bag (early LL bean down bag), back resting on a pack (early Kelty frame packs)  leaning against a tree.  Next to him was a Svea 123 stove with a small frying pan with a trout we just caught cooking as the sun was going down.  Second fond memory in Ohio at a place near old man’s cave with the Boy Scouts.  We set up camp and then went on a 10 mile hike.  During the hike it went from 65F and sunny, or around 40F with continuous rain.  Several of the boy didn’t seal up their tents and which resulted in much of their gear getting wet. Other kids had their tents collapse. Several didn’t bring warm enough clothing.  We cooked dinner in the rain, and then I joined my dad in his Sierra designs 3-man tent.  OMG… I loved that tent.  We dried off, got into our sleeping bags, lite an oil “candle lantern” that we hung from the peak, and played cards.  We were warm an cozy, with a storm raging, with just some thin nylon separating us. Several of the boys who were unprepared were gathered around a wood fire trying to keep warm. A few had gotten someone to open a car for them to warm up.  My bliss was cut short when the scout leaders determined that most of the kids were miserable and declared we were going to pack up, load up the cars, and drive home :(

Worst memories were with Boy Scouts… one of my fellow scouts didn’t rinse the soap off the dishes. After the next meal I got diarrhea just as I was going to bed. Likely the worst night I spend in the outdoors. Second worse was also with Boy Scouts. My dad was elsewhere, I hadn’t purchase a nylon tent for myself, I didn’t want to carry one of the 16lb? canvas voyager. I decided to try a plastic tube tent.  A storm rolled in and the night was spent awake trying to find a way to keep mostly dry.

Even though my dad taught me to go light, my time in the Boy Scouts taught me to be prepared = heavy with too much stuff.  There was a period of time I was carrying a 60-70lb pack?!  I sort of continued that trend until I was 40 and realized I just couldn’t carry that sort of weight.  I started to drop my weight, learned at lot from the old backpackinglight yahoo mailing list, and here an BPL.

In the friends beyond comfort zone I described some of how I take people out which I am sure way more labor intensive than a lot of people do.  I put the effort in to “pay it forward” … how my dad got me started.  I watched several fellow Boy Scouts avoid the backpacking trips after a “disastrous” and most of my buddies from those days stop backpacking by the time they finished college.  I want people to fall in love with the outdoors and make it a life long practice and experience some of the joy I regularly experience: a sense of accomplishment (pushing myself a bit) while experiencing the beauty that was all around… not to mention peace and quiet.

[David Thomas]

After years of camping on family trips with a canvas umbrella tent (a cheaper way to take family vacations) and Scout trips using army-surplus canvas pup tents with the WWII-era Scoutmaster, we got a Korea-era Scoutmaster who was into backpacking.  I was 16 when we did a 50-miler in the Sierra at 6,000-8,000 feet elevation.  We’d had a bunch of good-weather trips and the Scoutmaster for the first time allowed tube tents.  We had rain every day of the trip and the guy who had ALL the toilet paper got it all wet, so the first task at every campsite was to start a fire and start drying out the TP.  We did get really good at setting up tube tents to provide some reasonable coverage.

A friend from Scouts and I then started doing our own trips in the Sierra and around the mountain west.  Our gear choices were decent for the time: Jansport tent, REI fiber+down sleeping bag, Ensolite pads, Svea 123R stove.

I first went UL when co-leading trips through a backpacking store in 1984.  For an 8-day trip, I started with 29 pounds total and ended with a 19-pound base weight (including some group emergency and water-treatment gear) making my pack half the weight of the next lightest.  Tarp instead of tent, no sleeping bag, no stove.  Got a bit chilly sleeping at 9,500 feet, but I enjoyed it much more without the 40-pound loads.

[jscott]

My earliest memory in my life is being outside my grandfather’s cabin in Stehekin, Wa. And what a cabin! two story log structure with a kitchen, bathroom, two lower bedrooms and a giant fireplace in the huge dining/living room. Wood burning kitchen stove. Kids slept upstairs on bunkbeds. It’s still there, by the way. Lots of summers spent fishing those many streams in the area. We had a jeep and old chevy to drive to the various trailheads. this was before Stehekin became part of a national park.

After high school my older brother set me up with a trail crew working out of Bellingham. I was in Kirkland. My mother took me to the Seattle REI and bought me a decent solo tent, some rain gear and a Kelty pack. Oh, and some kind of leather hiking boots. After finishing the work over Cascade pass, it was on to the Hoh rain forest, where it rained every day for the week it took to do our work. Somehow that tent kept me dry, so thanks Mom! the next two summers were more of the same. That Kelty external frame carried a pulaski and a scythe like tool and other stuff as well as my gear. Our collective had pre-positioned food in plastic soap tubs hung in trees before we went in, so that helped with weight. I was a 120 pound debate student without a lot of muscle mass. Loved it all!

I do remember crossing one really high flowing river in the Cascades in my tennis shoes–geeze, I forgot I brought along tennis shoes–and then just saying ‘screw it’ and walking in those for the next many miles. crew mates thought this was funny. I liked having light feet. 1972-3.

[AK Granola]

My first remote trips were family canoe trips in the BWCA, not really backpacking trips. As soon as my brother and I passed our swim tests, about age 5 for me, our family started going every summer for 1-2 weeks. I think I whined a lot, but I also remember having a lot of fun. Campfires, swimming, catching fish, high grading the trail mix. Downsides – those scary privies with the spiders, mosquitoes, daylong rains. Firsts for loons, bears, northern lights. I guess those trips are why I moved even further north as an adult.

I backpacked with friends in my teens. All the heavy stuff, but we had fun every single time anyway, blisters and all. A few type 3 trips, but never the entire time; there was always fun to be had. So many memories.

[Diane “Piper” Soini]

When I was a kid my dad took my sister and me on a local hiking trail and we camped in the meadow. It’s 1.75 miles from the trailhead and I still hike that trail all that time. I don’t think you were ever allowed to camp there. It’s not really wilderness.

Then there was the time when I was 10 and my dad took our whole family and some neighborhood kids into the Sierras when there was still a lot of snow on the ground. We got lost and decided to just camp where we were. For some reason my mom had brought a cookie sheet and all us kids used it to slide down hills in the snow. My mom made pizza for dinner on that dented cookie sheet for my whole childhood.

When I was 14 we went on the church backpacking trip to Lake Nelson in the Sierras. 6 miles one way. My dad told us his pack weighed 100lbs. He had a volleyball and a net and a pump to pump up the ball. He had a fishing pole and tackle. He had a full-size aluminum folding lawn chair. He brought a pancake making machine. All weekend we kids played volleyball, fished and swam, and ate perfect pancakes for breakfast and perfect trout for dinner. On the way back I found a puppy with a broken leg that had been abandoned, carried it back and we took her home and kept her. Named her Nellie for Lake Nelson.

Because of my dad’s influence I went on to do the 55 mile High Sierra trip with my church, one of the best memories of my teenage years. Then when I was a senior in high school a group of 5 of us girls did a springtime hike on Manzana Creek to the Schoolhouse in an El Nino year. We counted over 70 stream crossings. My dog Nellie almost got washed away down the creek but the Freshman girl reached in and grabbed her before she got too far away. She was the hero.

When I was 10 my dad had a National Geographic book about the PCT. I looked at the pictures in there for my whole childhood. I stole the book and looked at the pictures for my whole young adulthood. I always said “someday.” Someday came in my 40s. I finally hiked the PCT. That was almost 15 years ago. I learned a lot from BPL about going light before I hiked the PCT.

I told these stories at my dad’s memorial service last fall. It was the best influence he had on my life.

[Ian H]

My inauspicious start was the school camp in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney, 1971. We were car camping folk, with one of those giant Andre Jamet canvas tents that had several bedrooms and a steel frame, 30-40 kg. Primus double burner gas stove, cast iron frypans etc. We were the Griswolds.

So when the school camp list came out for a backpacking trip, shiny new gear was purchased. A canvas pack with steel H-frame (about 5kg empty), A-frame tent (probably also 5 kg), I could use my existing sleeping bag (disposal store model, about the size of my torso when rolled, maybe 3 or 4 kg). Disposal store aluminium water bottle with thermal cover and saucepan base – maybe 1/2kg empty. The Esbit hexamine stove was probably the only lightweight item, otherwise I might have taken the Primus with a 5kg gas bottle.

It’s fair to say my mother was (and still is at 87!) a formidable woman, not to be argued with. If the school had sent a packing list, it was essential that everything on it be taken, she insisted, plus some extras. Another set of clothing (jeans to wear plus 2 spares…), and a dressing gown for the toilet block visits (I couldn’t make this up, yep, I carried a woollen dressing gown for a hike of 3 or 4 days. And there was no toilet/shower block.) The school’s error was not checking the pack contents, so there was no opportunity to dump anything before my dear mother waved goodbye at the bus. I was a pre-pubescent 12 year old, maybe 40-45kg, with a 25-30kg pack. I was like Bill Bryson’s mate Katz on their AT walk, ill-prepared and seriously overladen.

Downhill went ok, but it was early Summer, and when we got to steep uphill sections on the last day, I collapsed with heat exhaustion. Not helped by my whinging at the staff trying to get Oral Rehydration Solution into me, that it was salty. They told me it was supposed to be salty, but I remember being bewildered in my delirious state, as to why someone would think salty water was a good flavour. Probably part of the reason I still don’t understand salted caramel ice cream.

The H-frame stayed with me till I was 21, backpacking through Europe, and I upgraded to a Berghaus Cyclops Zappelli alpine pack (about half the weight). The last 40 years have been a gradual decreasing of weight, I just came back from a month in Europe (mostly visiting grandkids, no ‘serious’ walking but managed to average over 10km/day sightseeing) with a total of 4.5kg gear, including my Bonfus 58l Ultra pack.

I still see the people out there walking in their Target jeans and cotton flannelette lumberjack shirts, or discovering that leggings don’t work for bum-sliding down rock, and I have more sympathy than derision. Or when people crawl out of their leaky tent looking haggard like parents of triplets, with gastro and borderline hypothermia, and finding that their waterproof matches aren’t. I come out of my cozy Marmot down bag, piezo the Jetboil, and offer the poor suckers a hot tea. I often read the Coroner’s reports from Tasmania and New Zealand, and the trackside memorials at places like Hartz Peak or the Routeburn Track, and there’s a common theme of  ‘they were wearing jeans and t-shirts when an unexpected summer storm/blizzard hit them’. Being a noob is not always safe.

The beauty of an impartial site like BPL is getting real-world tips from people who’ve been there, done that, which is a lot safer and more pleasant than learning from experience!

[Author]

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