The Outward Bound Backpacker's Handbook

Beginner's Guide to Backpacking

Home » Backpacking Gear » The Outward Bound Backpacker's Handbook

Introduction

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."
Henry Thoreau, Walden, 1854.

Why go backpacking? Thoreau suggested one enduring answer. Backpacking is an antidote to industrialized society, where the pace of change accelerates constantly and buzzing swarms of tasks multiply exponentially, yet must be fitted into days that never grow longer. Every day, newspapers recite an endless dirge of war, poverty, oppression and environmental disaster. Backpacking provides an escape, temporarily, from life's complex and seemingly insoluble problems. In their stead, backpackers need only deal with a far more manageable set of concerns, each elemental in its simplicity: finding the easiest route, summoning the energy to walk that last mile, selecting a good campsite. Backpacking offers an abundance of life's most repeatable pleasures, the ones that never grow stale: resting when you're tired, eating when you're hungry, drinking when you're thirsty and smashing a mosquito just before it bites.

To those basic pleasures, I would add two more, less connected with survival of the body than with survival of the spirit. The first is the quest for adventure. From one perspective, struggling mightily to reach a pass or the summit of a lofty mountain is absurd, possibly even mildly deranged; and yet, as the bumper sticker says, "If I wasn't nuts, I'd go insane." Sol Roy Rosenthal, M.D., has spent many years studying what he calls the "risk-exercise response," a powerful feeling of euphoria that follows participation in an adventurous sport. Rosenthal is quick to point out that he's not talking about life-threatening endeavors, but rather sports like skiing that contain an element of challenge, that cause participants to push themselves in some way, that provide some sense of venturing into the unknown. According to Rosenthal, the risk-exercise response goes beyond simply feeling good. Risk-takers talk of living up to their potential, of feeling fulfilled and yet expecting more from their lives. For me, many of the hours I have spent hiking, climbing and skiing in the wilderness stand out like lighthouse beacons in the night as I look back over the vast sea of undistinguished days that make up the bulk of my suburban life.

Finally, to the pleasures mentioned above I would add the experience of profound beauty, an experience often intensified by strenuous effort. When I was 13, my father and I hiked up Strawberry Peak, one of the smaller peaks in the ring of mountains that almost encircles Los Angeles. As we were coming down, we crossed a creek. We knew that the trail led away from the creek for a spell, avoiding the deep canyon into which the creek disappeared, then crossed the creek again a mile or so further down as the canyon walls diminished in height. To my boyish mind, the obvious proposition was irresistible: why not follow the creek through its dark and mysterious gorge? My father agreed, and we plunged in. All too soon, we discovered why the trail led around the canyon. The creek plunged over a 10-foot cliff, creating a lovely waterfall and a formidable obstacle to further progress. For a time we contemplated retracing our steps, but the day was old and our legs had lost their spring. I spied a line of footholds and handholds tracing a possible route around the falls and began inching down, no doubt worrying my father tremendously. When I succeeded, he had to follow – which probably worried him even more. Overjoyed at our success, but wondering if a larger, impassable waterfall lay just around the corner, we hurried around the next bend and discovered a marvelous limpid pool carved into the stone and filled to the brim by a bubbling cascade. I said to my father, "That's so perfect it looks manmade." He replied, in words that have stuck with me for almost 30 years, "That's the kind of perfection man strives to imitate."

Though nearly three decades have elapsed since that simple hike, the excitement of our little adventure and the small but stunning vision of beauty it offered are still the twin keys to my lifelong fascination with wilderness. There are no blank spots on the map anymore, no places marked "terra incognita," but there are still thousands of blank spots in my experience, thousands of peaks to climb and canyons to explore, thousands of wilderness vistas to feast upon with awestruck eyes. For me, no painting, sculpture, or photograph, no city, monument or building – nothing manmade – has ever compared to the beauty of nature at its grandest.

Backpackers don't set the 20th century aside when they hoist their loads and head into the wilderness. Backpackers don't live off the land in any significant sense. If every backpacker cut his own bough bed, felled saplings to build a lean-to and speared a porcupine for supper, the woods would become a wasteland in short order. In fact, far from spurning technology, backpackers frequently embrace it. The backpacking boom that began in the early 1970s was spurred on significantly by the application of sophisticated technology to the task of creating clothing, tents, stoves and packs that could reasonably be carried on a bowed but unbroken human back. Necessarily, however, the use of technology is limited by backpacking's iron law: if you want it with you, you have to carry it (unless, of course, you can bribe your companion). Some backpackers – perhaps all of them at one time or another – become fascinated by the equipment game, minutely comparing the merits of one stove against another, one rain jacket against a second and third. Choosing gear that allows you to balance convenience, comfort and utility with weight and bulk is an amusing sport, but one that ultimately misses the point. The heart and soul of backpacking can and should go much deeper than the love and mastery of gadgets.

Six years have passed since I wrote the first edition of this book. In that time, equipment has continued to evolve and in some cases even improve. In response, I have fully updated the sections on equipment.
The soul of this book remains unchanged: the effort to instill a reverence for the wilderness that will allow low-impact hiking and camping practices to become second nature. These techniques have changed little since the first edition, but the need to apply them thoughtfully and consistently grows more urgent every year. Living simply in the woods is good practice for living in civilization. If we can learn to see the wilderness for what it is – a precious, irreplaceable, fragile treasure – then perhaps we can learn to see the whole world in the same light, and so save ourselves from the threat of ecological catastrophe.

Next Page: Miscellaneous Backpacking Essentials

Site Map -