This day and age with all of the fun goodies and technology hiking in a pair of jeans with a 70 pound backpack is pretty much a thing of the past. However a growing trend among backpackers is to become ultra light (UL). What UL means is that your base wait on your pack is 10 pounds or less. The base weight on a pack are all things that will not change from town to town...basically everything except for food and water. The idea behind UL is that less weight on your back the happier you are and the further you can hike. The down side to this strategy is at night or when you take a break you are often cold. On the flip side a regular pack can have a 25 pound base weight but when you get to camp you have luxuries like fleece pants. So the question is UL or regular?
Well for me I decided on regular. My thought is I am living out of my backpack for five plus months so I want those small comforts. The down side of this is when I put in 25 pounds of food into my pack for the Sierras I will be hating life.
I did recently get to do a stint as an UL packer on the way to one of the trail angels in the area. From the Soufley's to the Anderson's is about 25 miles and I was lucky enough to be able to make that trek UL when a fellow hiker had his car move his stuff from one house to the next. Seeing an opportunity I asked if I could have my stuff transported as well and lucky for me, I could. So for that 25 mile stretch I got my taste of UL and I am not going to lie it was pretty sweet. The only things I carried was a water bottle, a jacket to hold the bottle and my trekking polls. It didn't matter what the trail threw at me, I demolished it. Even though I only had a liter of water on me, I was moving so fast that reaching the next water source took no time at all. I definitely felt a bit smug as I flew past fellow hikers, but that bliss was only for a day. I am now back to my sturdy pack and all the joys of comfort and...weight.
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