I never used to be too concerned about the weight of my camping gear, but that’s because I’ve always had horses to get deep into the backcountry. I still have horses, but sometimes it’s good to just get where you want to go on your own two feet.
But that means carrying everything you need on your back. And when you do that, you might want to pay careful attention to just how much weight you’re carrying. Again, I never really concerned myself with that much, but then I got older. In my 20s and 30s, I actually wore a heavy pack like a badge of honor. But not anymore. All the backpacking gurus say your pack should be no more than 20 percent of your body weight, and as I’ve gotten older, even that seems a little daunting to me. Yet there I was, on that hike into the Cloud Peak Wilderness, with a pack edging up on 40 percent of my weight.
Now, I will admit I had more in my pack than I really needed. We were headed to the top of Bomber Mountain, so I had to have at least one Blacktooth Brewery Bomber Mountain beer for each of us, but I didn’t need the whole six-pack. And a few Twizzlers would have been wonderful on the trail, but I probably shouldn’t have bought the two-pound bag.
Yeah, I could have saved some weight with some of that. But there was only so much I could shave off. My tent and sleeping bag aren’t exactly lightweight camping gear. My sleeping bag is 7.8 pounds, and the tent is 10.4. Compare that to, say, the Kuiu Mountain Star tent, which is 3.45 pounds. And the Kuiu 15-degree sleeping bag is 2.17 pounds. That right there would be a reduction of 12 and a half pounds. I’d still need to leave a few beers behind and probably opt for a smaller bag of Twizzlers, but I think some new gear is certainly in my future.
