How light is too light?
April 1st, 2011 Posted in travelWe started packing last week I’m pretty sure, but you can never start too early, in my opinion, as trips like this take a lot of preparation and planning. As we started planning on what to take, it wasn’t so much what to take, but how light we could pack. After all you can’t take luggage up a mountain, yet wanted to take enough clothes to get ‘dressed up’ to go to nice dinners at the hotels. Decisions, decisions.
So we opted to go the route we took in Europe which was to take a single day-pack that would allow us to take everything we need, yet would be light enough to hike with all our gear without having to find a locker or some place to secure it. I don’t recall what size of pack we used for Europe, I presume it was around 40L, so that’s where we started. REI has a great travel-oriented pack that’s geared for travel specifically with lots of pockets, yet has a light-internal frame that allows for hiking with it, the REI Lookout 40. So after getting both packs, we thought we should give it a test run before the ‘night before’ just-in-case. Well good thing we did, as shortly after I put in my sleeping bag I realized it wouldn’t fit everything I wanted to take. Amazingly, Laura was able to fit all her stuff in the 40L pack, amazing! I was taking the DSLR, telephoto lens, GoPro camera, phone, chargers, etc. so I needed a bit more room. But impressive none-the-less. So I went and swapped out the Lookout 40 for the REI Flash 50. A great pack, less pockets, but that was fine by me.
After getting back and about 100 1-gallon ziplocs later (to pack our clothing in air-tight) and about 2 hours going through our packing list, I think we have it all. Naturally I was curious, how much would my 50L pack weight including probably 5-6 lbs. of camera gear, plus 3 lbs. for the pack. Well I got on the scale and everything all-together was only 24.8 lbs! Amazing considering we were packing for 10-days, including our sleeping bags! I was stoked, plus I have just enough room in case we find souvenirs to bring home. Laura’s pack… well let’s just say she didn’t leave one square inch to spare in packing. She has a natural gift I think at spatial puzzles because she can always pack more than I can in smaller spaces.
Well that’s about it, we’re packed and ready to roll. See you on the other side!