Talked with a thru-hiker at the diner last night and now I'm second guessing my whole setup

I was grabbing a late breakfast at this little place near the trailhead in Shenandoah and this grizzled guy sits down next to me. He's done the AT twice and the PCT once, so I figured I'd pick his brain about pack weight. He just laughed and said I was overthinking my gear list, that half the stuff I was carrying he ditched after his first 50 miles. He pointed at my 4 season tent and said 'you bring a house to a hostel, you know?' I've been trimming grams for months now, watching all these YouTube ultralight videos, and this dude just cleared it with a single sentence. Made me wonder if I've been wasting time on the wrong details while missing the big picture. How do you guys know when to stop tweaking and just go already?

2 comments

2 Comments

fionaa351d ago

Read something similar in a blog post last week where this guy stripped down to basically just a bivy and a stove for a 500 mile section. Wild how much we overcomplicate things before we actually hit the trail.

alicea262d ago

Oh man I totally get this! I did the same thing my first time, obsessed over every gram and then ran into a guy on the JMT who was carrying a tarp and a foam pad from a gardening store. What finally clicked for me was doing a shakedown hike in my backyard overnight. I set up my tent, cooked dinner, slept out there, and realized half my gear never left my pack. The big one was my stove system, I trimmed a pound by switching to a simple alcohol stove and pot setup after that test. So yeah, your mileage may vary, but a practice run really showed me what I was actually using versus what just looked good on a gear list.