Pound foolish

Last weekend Laura and I went backpacking in Saguaro National Park. It's the first time we went backpacking since our trip to Pine Mountain last April. This time we went with a group, the Arizona Backpacking Club.

Laura and I were in the company of people who know a lot more about backpacking than we do. Many of these people have backpacked many dozens of times, all over the state or beyond, in all four seasons, sometimes for many nights at a time. Unsurprisingly, a lot of their gear is much better than ours.

Many ABC members use ultralight gear. They carry an astonishingly small amount of stuff to survive a night in the cold desert wilderness. One guy, Mark, carried a pack that totaled fifteen pounds in weight, and that included some splurge items, such as a pair of binoculars, as well as necessities that Laura and I do without, such as a stove. By comparison, my backpack when empty weighs nearly half as much as Mark's entire load. Add to that a tent, two sleeping bags (because I play sherpa for Laura), a sleeping pad, food, clothes, water, tools, first-aid kit, and other miscellanea, and my load was triple the weight of Mark's.

My gear suits car camping, where weight doesn't matter and size barely does. For backpacking, my gear is merely adequate. But even so it's a stark improvement compared to what I used for the Havasupai trip three summers ago. On that trip I didn't even have a backpacking backpack. Instead, I bungee-tied half my load to a day-hike bag, which lacked a frame and sagged under the weight. In hindsight, that setup was probably sufficient if I had carried the featherlight load Mark carried to Saguaro NP last weekend, but instead I carried a heavy Wal-mart tent amidst a heap of other junk that included four pounds of cheese.

My gear is heavy because ultralight equipment is expensive and fragile whilst I am cheap and destructive. Also, when considering one piece of gear at a time, weight savings seem insignificant. An ultralight stuff sack may weigh an ounce less than a non-ultralight stuff sack, but it costs more and is more likely to rip because of its thinner material. An ounce doesn't seem like much, so at the time of purchase, the non-ultralight sack seems like a better deal. Because the same logic works for most other equipment, the result is that piece by piece, ounce by ounce and pound by pound, one eventually buys the straw that breaks the camel's back.

That said, I own one piece of gear that's good: my spork. Annoyed after having gone on several trips where I packed and carried conventional silverware from the kitchen drawer—a knife, spoon, and fork trio adding up to a pound or so—last year I bought a titanium spork. It cost me about $8. That's a lot for an eating utensil, but as sporks go, this one is full-featured.

In addition to weighing nearly nothing, and rather than awkwardly combining the spoon and fork together at one end so that it's too small for soup but too fat to stab lettuce—as a traditional spork is—my spork has a full spoon on one end and a full fork on the other. Both ends act as a handle for the other, which isn't gross by camping standards. What's more is that one of the outer tines on the fork end is mildly serrated so as to act like a knife in a pinch. Because the spork replaces the full trio of utensils, it saves me one pound of weight.

Thirty more pounds to go.