Gear

Backpacking gear is really awesome. It continually amazes me how light and compact survival gear has become. Super lightweight, durable, waterproof/water resistent fabrics have made shelters, sleeping bags, packs, and clothes incredibly lightweight and compact. Extremely minimalistic backpackers can safely walk into the wilderness for days at a time with less than 10 pounds on their backs, which is slightly more than the weight of a gallon of milk. That doesn't include food or water, but it still boggles my mind.

Not a modern day backpacker,
except maybe for the bottle of booze

Granted, you have to give up a lot to go that light. You have no luxuries such as cameras or phones, you have no changes of clothes, and if you are lucky your shelter is a tarp that you stake out and support with your hiking poles. But you do have enough gear to be safe in a wide range of conditions.

Liz and I are not quite that extreme - our packs are about 12 lbs before water and food. There are some comforts we're not willing to give up - things like having a fully enclosed tent so we can sleep bug-free, and having a spare shirt and pair of underwear so we can rinse them out in streams to stay "fresh" (a relative term when you've gone 5 days without a shower). But we do like trying to keep our packs as light as possible.  I thought I'd run through a few of the gadgets and tricks we use to trim those ounces.

We carry a Steripen for water sterilization. It's basically a UV lamp which you stir in a liter of water for about 90 seconds. It doesn't kill the bacteria in the water, but it does mutate their DNA enough to ensure that they can't reproduce in your gut and make you sick. It weighs a few ounces (2.6 oz, to be exact), which is lighter than just about any adequate water filter you can find. It also doesn't add a funky taste to the water like iodine or other sterilizing chemicals... there's nothing better than pristine ice cold mountain stream water, and we hate ruining the taste with chemicals.

A Steripen in action!

We also carry an alcohol stove made from half of a soda can and a sheet of aluminum. The sheet metal acts as a wind shield, and the soda can holds about an ounce or two of denatured alcohol. This is enough to boil a few cups of water, which is all we need to rehydrate or cook our dinners. We bought the "Caldera Cone" from Trail Designs, because they've put a lot of research and testing into a good hole pattern for the windshield that focuses the heat on the pot, but doesn't starve the fire. You could also easily make your own version of this stove for a few dollars.

Our stove, the windshield, a fuel bottle, and a
convenient carrying case for everything

This stove is great for a number of reasons. It's an incredibly light cooking setup - 5 ounces if you include the case that holds everything. Most other lightweight camp stoves take special gas canisters that can be hard to find in remote areas, and also can only be shipped via ground because of postal regulations. Getting fuel for these stoves can be a major headache. This stove is the exact opposite - all it needs is denatured alcohol, which is very readily available. Heet, a common anti-freeze, is a great fuel, and can be found in just about any convenience store or gas station. Also, it's incredibly efficient.  In ideal conditions, it can boil 2 cups of water with ~half an ounce of fuel. Even if you play it safe, you can get away with an ounce or two of fuel per day, which is fantastic!

You do give up some convenience with a stove like this though. It takes longer to boil water with this stove than a canister stove. There's also no control over the size of the flame, so boiling water is the only option - no simmering. But the weight savings make it well worth it, especially because we are usually too tired and hungry to want to do anything more complicated than boil water for dinner.

Another important gadget is our food dehydrator. We don't bring this on the trail with us, but it gets a lot of use before we leave. We make the usual dehydrator fare - beef jerky and fruit rollups - but it turns out you can dehydrate just about anything. We've dehydrated chili, chickpeas and lentils in a simmer sauce, rice and beans, canned chicken, and even tuna, for dinners on the trail. I don't think we'd repeat the tuna (it didn't go bad, but the rehydrated tuna stench was repulsive and hard to get rid of), but the rest were great.

Cous cous, dehydrated veggies, and some olive oil.
Just add boiling water!

The meals we make are cheaper, and usually tastier than pre-packaged dehydrated meals. Unfortunately, making 5 months of meals up front isn't really a possibility, so we'll probably end up eating a lot of noodles and other pre-packaged dried food on the TA.

Our best dehydrator trick isn't actually food though - it's toothpaste! We spread a bunch of toothpaste blobs out in the dehydrator tray, and end up with a ziplock bag full of single serving dried toothpaste dots. Lighter, easier to deal with than a whole tube of toothpaste, and you always know exactly how many more times you can brush your teeth.

Hershey kisses, or toothpaste? (credit)

I could go on for several more pages about our tent, sleeping bags, sleeping pads, hiking poles, etc... almost every piece of gear we have is neat or innovative in some way. But the last cool gadget for today is our flashlight - a Photon Micro-Light II. It's a tiny LED flashlight that weighs 1/3 of an ounce, but gives off incredibly bright light. Most people carry headlamps that weigh a few ounces, and require AA or AAA batteries (you always need spares, and the spares are heavy!)

The awesomely tiny, but bright, Photon Micro-Light II

We stuck a small piece of velcro to one side of the light, and another piece of velcro to the brims of our hats... so we can even turn these into hands-free headlamps if we need to! In reality, we're usually in bed and almost asleep before it gets really dark though...

If you are interested in seeing the rest of our gear, we have a spreadsheet (are you surprised?) here that lists everything, along with the weight of each item.