EXPOSE
How Much Gear Do You Really Need? By Ben Fortson NOLS Grad and Former Instructor
Above and right: Excessive gear may shrink our interaction with wild, minimize or remove natural challenges, and subtly re-create what we are trying to escape. Nicholas Valentine & Molly Hagbrand
14 | THE LEADER
A
lpine Trailblazer. Boundless Mountaineer. Mystic Trekker. Although these spuriously-named, home-ina-can behemoths strut past your $12 campsite—mocking your couch-less two-person tent and your shoddy picnic site—no self-respecting outdoor educator is going to haul one of these big-ass recreation vehicles into the Wind River Range. Not only are RVs spectacularly ill-suited for backcountry travel, but they’re the god-awful, life-sucking antithesis to everything you value about wild. At least… that’s what you think you believe. Take the SunWave3 for example. At 3 oz., the solar-powered, portable microwave can heat your freezedried enchilada ranchero in 20 seconds, then fold up into the palm of your hand. What’s not to love about that?! Well…for starters, it kind of sounds like something you’d find in an RV, only more compact. And—more troubling—some of you, just now, abandoned this article to google the fictional SunWave3, just to see if you could spring for it. In spite of our loyalty and lust for wild, we outdoor folks are routinely duped by our own contraptions. Metaphorically speaking, we often can’t see the forest for the trees—y’know, the ones our Enos are tied to.
