What we actually carry: a packing philosophy

In the corner of my office in Asheville there is a luggage scale, a permanent marker, and a shelf of small stuff-sacks with weights written on them in my own handwriting, and I want to be clear from the outset that I am aware of how this looks. Twenty-five years ago I walked my first long trail with a pack so heavy that a hut warden in the Smokies lifted it, whistled, and asked whether I was carrying a second, smaller man inside it. Every trail mile since has been, among other things, a negotiation with that younger self about what actually deserves to come along.

This is not a gear list. Gear lists rot: brands change, models die, and what suits a teahouse trek in Nepal will fail you in a Patagonian campsite. What survives is a way of deciding — a philosophy of the pack — and after thousands of miles it can be compressed into a few principles that will serve you on any trail in this journal, whatever is in the shops this season.

Weight is a tax on every step

Begin with the only number that matters: every kilogram in your pack is lifted, carried and set down roughly a thousand times per walking hour. A ten-day trek is a million repetitions. There is no item light enough to be free — the tax is levied on everything, in currency of knees, and the exchange rate worsens with every year past forty. The old backpacker's benchmark still holds: a loaded multi-day pack should not exceed about a fifth of your body weight, and on supported routes — teahouse treks, hut-to-hut circuits, inn-to-inn pilgrimages, which is to say most of the walks we cover — you can and should live far below it. My pack for the Kumano Kodo weighed six kilograms with water. I lacked nothing.

Nobody has ever finished a long trail wishing they had carried more. The reverse regret is universal, and it is usually discovered on the second morning, on the first long climb.

Pack for the trail you booked, not the one you fear

The heaviest packs on any trail belong to the walkers who packed for imaginary emergencies — the fourth fleece against a cold that the teahouse stove would have solved, the camp cookset on a route with a hot dinner every twelve kilometers. Before anything goes in the bag, answer three questions honestly. Where do I sleep? If beds and blankets are provided, the entire shelter-and-sleep department of your pack collapses to a silk liner. Where do I eat? If kitchens feed you nightly, food shrinks to trail snacks and one emergency ration. What is the genuine worst weather? Not the theoretical worst — the seasonal, statistical worst, which the route's hut wardens and park pages will tell you plainly. Pack for that, add one margin layer, and stop. The trail you booked is the trail you should carry.

The system, not the object

Experienced packs are organized as systems, and the master system is clothing. The rule is old and unimprovable: layers, never outfits. A wicking base, a warm mid-layer, an insulated jacket, a shell against rain and wind — four layers that combine to cover every condition from valley heat to a sleeting col, in any combination, without a single garment that serves only one scenario. Two of everything against the skin — one worn, one washed and drying on the pack — and nothing more, because the third shirt is not comfort, it is cargo. Cotton stays home; it absorbs water, refuses to release it, and has been implicated in more mountain hypothermia than any blizzard.

The other systems follow the same logic. Water: know the refill map, carry capacity for the longest dry stretch plus a margin, never more. First aid: blister care you have actually practiced, painkillers, any personal medication, and the honest admission that beyond that you are carrying reassurance, not medicine. Electronics: a phone, a power bank sized to the days between sockets, one cable — the drone stays home, and so, we would gently argue, does the laptop.

What always earns its place

Minimalism has a failure mode, and it is the walker shivering at a col because the forecast was treated as a promise. Some things ride in my pack on every trail, whatever the trip: the rain shell, in the top pocket, always, because weather is the one itinerary item nobody confirms. A warm hat and liner gloves, forty grams that have rescued more afternoons than everything else combined. A real map and compass alongside the phone, because batteries are a fair-weather technology. A headlamp, because the day you misjudge a stage is not announced in advance. Blister supplies within reach, not buried. And one small luxury, chosen deliberately — mine is a paper notebook; my wife's is proper coffee and a tiny brewer — because a pack with no pleasure in it makes a joyless walker, and the point of all this subtraction was never asceticism. It was attention.

The lighter you pack, the more you carry home

That is the trade hiding under all of it. Every kilogram removed from the pack is transferred, with interest, to the walk itself: to the spare energy that lets you take the high variant, to the knees that survive the descent smiling, to the attention freed from strap-pain and available for the mountains you came to see. My pack has lost weight steadily for twenty-five years, and every trip has been richer for it. The younger man with the second, smaller man in his backpack walked some fine trails and remembers mostly the shoulder straps. I intend to keep subtracting until all that is left is the walking — and I recommend, from long and occasionally blistered experience, that you start your own subtraction tonight, on the kitchen floor, with a luggage scale and an honest hour.