Back Country – Picking a Pack That Works

"I live not in myself, but I become
Portion of that around me: and to me
High mountains are a feeling, but the hum
Of human cities torture."
Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, 1812

The road to hell is paved with good packs used badly. I still wince at the thought of my own mistakes. There was the time I finished a five-day ascent of Yosemite's 3,000-vertical-foot El Capitan, then packed 60 pounds of steel and aluminum rock-climbing hardware into a day pack designed for 25-pound loads and hauled it seven miles back down to my campsite. And the time seven friends and I climbed Alaska's 16,237-foot Mt. Sanford. At the beginning of the expedition, we made two trips, carrying half our gear each time, from the bush landing strip to the foot of the glacier. Coming out, however, we were too eager for showers, pizza and rock 'n roll to adopt such a sane approach, so we decided to make only one trip, carrying everything in one gigantic load. At the foot of the glacier, I filled my gargantuan internal-frame pack to the brim, loosened the pack lid's extension straps to their limit, crammed in some more, then lashed a fiberglass sled and heavy mountaineering skis on top. My pack must have weighed 90 pounds—about two-thirds as much as I did. I felt like an Olympic weight-lifter doing the clean-and-jerk on a gold-medal weight each time I hoisted my pack. After two repetitions, it became impossible to lift it without assistance, and I was forced to ask for help in getting it on after each rest stop for the remainder of the trailless nine-mile hike out over the tundra. Fortunately, someone else agreed to carry the 12-gauge shotgun we'd brought as grizzly insurance. A couple of years later, I carried a similar-size load of camera gear into the Grand Canyon to photograph a rafting expedition. I had packed the pack while it was sitting on the tail gate of my pickup so I could slip it on without actually lifting it off the ground. That meant, however, that all the way into the canyon I could never set the pack down without finding a tailgate-high, flat-topped rock to set it on. People stopped me on the trail repeatedly and said things like, "That's the biggest pack I've ever seen." At first I was secretly proud. Then the pain got too great and I would just smile through tight lips and keep walking.

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