I’ve had a couple days to digest all the stuff we learned in the Sierra Club
lightweight backpacking class taught by Steve of WildeBeat fame. A few conclusions:
"Either you hike to camp, or you camp to hike." I’m guessing
an engineer coined this phrase because it posits a neatly binary look at backpacking.
If your philosophy is the former, you carry all you can stand because the campout,
not the hike, is the point for getting out there. If it’s the latter, camping
is just something you put up with to keep on hiking, so the less you carry,
the farther you can get out there. But we don’t live on microchips, so we don’t
need to be all either-or about everything. Find a comfortable notch between
these two extremes and you’re apt to enjoy yourself a lot more.
Distance isn’t everything. It seems like the greatest selling point
to lightweight backpacking is how much more ground you can cover comfortably.
Well, you can do a long walk in your living room if you’re determined enough.
Miles do matter, and covering more ground can expose you to things you wouldn’t
have experienced otherwise, but the very act of walking robs you of everything
you can experience only when standing still. It’s not a hike if you’re not moving,
of course, but I feel like the faster I’m walking, the less nature I’m absorbing.
Where you camp is everything. Campsite selection can’t be found
on a shelf at REI or ordered from a cottage manufacturer, so it doesn’t get
as much attention as it deserves. If you go light and camp with a tarp, you
absolutely have to find areas sheltered from the wind and elevated from valley
floors where cold air descends overnight (heavier tents keep you warmer and
block wind better). Developed campsites with their hard-packed ground will require
you to carry a heavy inflatable sleeping pad if you have any hope of getting
a good night’s sleep. The ground of a forest floor or meadow generally is soft
enough that you can sleep on a cheep, lightweight closed-cell pad. This is where
going light gets you closer to nature … in a tarp in tall grass, for instance,
you’re right down there at ground level. Granted, this exposes you to all the
creepy-crawlies living in that ground, but your sleeping bag and ground cloth
will keep them out (mostly). You might love or hate the experience, but you
will not forget it.
Less weight means more options. If your pack weighs seven pounds when
you could get by with one that weighs four, that’s three pounds of other stuff
you can’t take along. Camera gear springs to mind: you could take a tripod along
with the weight saved by switching from a tent to a tarp. Add an extra lens
by subtracting the weight of a ThermaRest and a water filter.
More weight is hazardous to your health. You might think carrying 50
pounds will just make you stronger, but it might also do things to your hips,
knees, feet and back that won’t heal naturally. Heavy loads endanger your balance
on tricky bits of trail and increase death-march factor of steep hills.
There is no discernible difference between 22 pounds and 22.1 pounds.
No need to drive yourself batty trying to reduce your pack weight. If you can
get your base weight down to 15-18 pounds, you’re probably going light enough.
Those are some thoughtful observations. I’m in harmonious agreement with you on the last four. But I have comments/quibbles on the first two.
Either you hike to camp, or you camp to hike.
In real life, most dichotomous statements are artificial. This clever, illustrative phrase was devised to illustrate the extremes on what is clearly a continuum. But in understanding how people function at the extremes, we can make better case-by-case, item-by-item choices about which direction to tend.
Distance isn’t everything.
No, but it’s a thrill to some, and irrelevant to others. If you’re going for that solitude-in-the-wilderness experience, you’re more likely to find a grassy bench by a creek to yourself if you are capable of covering a little more ground than the majority of other users of that same wilderness. Once I get beyond the striking distance of the average weekender, the wilderness seems more pristine, more wild. You aren’t necessarily walking faster — we’re giving you a way to optimize miles per day, not miles per hour.
Sizing-up wilderness.
One thing that being able to cover more ground really brings into focus is how small a lot of these protected wilderness areas actually are. When 8 miles was a big day for me, a 200,000 acre wilderness or park seemed like a place that would take a lifetime to explore. Now I capable of crossing it in two days — it doesn’t seem so large any more. I can imagine how boxed-in some of the large wide-ranging mammals in those areas must feel.
But this isn’t a battle between the “study every bug and flower” crowd versus the “dying to get to the next vista” crowd — nor between the “kick back and fish crowd” versus the “peak bagger” crowd. You’ve simply learned more ways to hike your own hike.
Steve: all good points, thanks for adding your perspective.
Come to think of it, though, I think we oughta seriously consider burying the phrase “do you hike to camp, or camp to hike?” The problem is this attempt at a truism lacks the “Where’s the Beef” clarity of a memorable one-liner. It’s not intuitive and requires the reader/listener to think about it too long to figure out what it means.
The phrase is obviously a play on “do you live to work, or work to live?” The problem is that hike-to-camp/camp-to-hike has none of that comes-a-dawning moral clarity. It’s just confusing. Everybody hikes to their campsites, and “camp to hike” is not a phrase in anybody’s vocabulary. It’s like a poor punchline to a good joke. It’s not very punchy if the comic has to explain what it means.
The more obvious question is: are you a hiker or a camper? Clear, succinct, straight to the point. As we’ve established, they won’t be all one or the other, but it’s far more intuitive continuum.
I like to hike into an area away from people, then set up a camp and hike around it, all the while looking for a better place to set up a base camp which I then move to and hike from. Every few days I like to move my base camp.
So I hike to camp to hike to camp to hike to camp to hike to camp…