Then & Now
W
A LOOK AT THE EVOLUTION OF BACKPACKING GEAR
hat would you pack for a 1,500 mile walk? What do you need to travel through wild places while living out of a backpack, potentially for months at a time? Probably less than you think! Getting away with carrying less has always been a preoccupation of thru-hikers. Back in 1955 Grandma Gatewood famously packed little more than a duffel bag, plastic sheet, and blanket on her thru-hike of the Appalachian Trail. Luckily for today's hikers, the intervening years have seen a revolution in lightweight hiking gear, even as the basic requirements have remained the same: shelter from the elements, an insulated sleep system, and a pack to carry it all in. The result has been a dramatic reduction in pack weights while maintaining comfort and efficiency. At the same time, another technological innovation has become ubiquitous along the trail, just as it has everywhere else: the smartphone. These two developments—a shift towards extremely lightweight gear and
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Florida Trail Association
widespread adoption of smartphones—have together fundamentally changed the longdistance backpacking experience. Much of the evolution in gear has been driven by thru-hikers, the long-haulers of the hiking world. A thru-hike is a complete end-to-end trip along a trail system such as the Florida Trail or Appalachian Trail. These trips are often measured in months and hundreds, if not thousands, of miles. For the FT, this involves navigating some 1,500 miles of swamp, forest, and prairie between Fort Pickens and Big Cypress, essentially crossing the entire state of Florida. It makes sense that the longest, toughest backpacking trips benefit the most from lighter, more efficient equipment. Experienced backpackers start to consider the utility of every single ounce they carry. A few ounces might not seem like much, but when you consider the energy required to carry those ounces over thousands of miles, day after day, it quickly adds up. There is a gratifying feedback loop from FloridaTrail.org
packing less and using lighter equipment; every ounce saved translates to a bit of saved energy per mile, meaning that same mile can be covered more quickly and with less fatigue. Traveling at a faster pace means that one can comfortably cover more miles per day and spend less time between resupply locations. Fewer days between resupply allows one to carry less food and fuel, which means even greater weight savings, and thus the loop continues. Take this concept of lightweight packing to its extreme, and you have today's super-ultralight backpackers, hikers with base weights—the weight of all equipment minus consumables such as food, water, and fuel—of as little as 5 pounds. To put this into context, the traditional measure of a light base weight has been anything under 20 pounds. Back in the days when the FT was first being blazed it was routine for backpackers to carry well over 50 pounds of gear. The design of backpacks is probably the most visible sign of the transition towards
Photo courtesy of the FTA Archives
by Adam Fryska, Panhandle Trail Program Manager
