Making light of a heavy load

By Mary Forgione

May 17, 2005 12 AM PT

I’m standing at a campground 25 miles behind the rocky brow that gazes down on Highway 395 just south of Lone Pine. Nearby, two Pacific Crest Trail signs -- metal triangles embossed with the tree-and-peaks logo -- point in opposite directions: north to the Sierra, south to L.A. It’s a blue-sky Sunday afternoon, too early for the crush of long-distance summer hikers who swarm to the nearby general store.

Here at the edge of a flat sea of sagebrush, where most backpackers would pause to stretch or check out a map, I drag a bathroom scale out of the car and place it squarely on the ground.

“You go first,” I say.

My companion for this trip, Demetri Coupounas, steps on, shouldering a sleek featherweight backpack that looks as if it could blow away in a stiff wind. It weighs 16 pounds, including full water bottles and two trekking poles -- roughly 8 pounds of gear and 8 pounds of food and water.

Then I hoist my pack, which looks like a fully loaded Humvee, onto my knee and struggle into the shoulder straps. Exterior pockets bulge with water bottles, flashlights, energy bars and enough plastic bags to open a supermarket (in case of rain). A rolled-up tent and sleeping pad are lashed to the bottom, and a huge bearproof food canister threatens to leap from the top. Forty pounds on the nose.

I have challenged Coup, as he’s known, to a 20-plus-mile trek on the Pacific Crest Trail. For years backpackers have been ingrained with the notion that the more stuff you bring, the better prepared you are for whatever Mother Nature dishes out. But more than a decade ago, a so-called lightweight revolution turned that kind of thinking on its head by suggesting hikers don’t have to be slaves to burdensome packs. In fact, they might be more comfortable and have more fun if they weren’t.

It’s a philosophy this 39-year-old prince of lightness practices, preaches and peddles as president and co-founder of GoLite, a Boulder, Colo.-based company that manufactures and markets pound-shedding outdoor clothing and equipment. Gear giants such as North Face and Black Diamond have been churning out lighter versions of tents, bags and other items, but GoLite is a company that has staked its future on strangely named light materials such as Dyneema and Equilibrium.

As I awkwardly step off the scale, Coup smiles. He’s used to seeing backpackers who carry heavy loads; heck, he used to be one. A little embarrassed about my girth, I spill the contents of my pack onto a picnic table for a quick consult on what to ditch.

“Why do you need this?” he asks, picking up a 6-inch aluminum dish as if it were a barbell. “Why not just eat out of your cooking pot?” He eyes my fork and spoon as if they were rivals in an old western: My pack isn’t big enough for the two of them. The fork goes. Then he points to a lone pair of underwear. “You won’t need those on such a short trip.”

Soon a small hairbrush, plastic mug, extra flashlight, wool sweater, warm leggings, camping towel, two servings of dried soup mix and three energy bars lie scattered in the back of the car. In less than 10 minutes I’ve lost 5 pounds.

After two decades of backpacking, I thought I had fine-tuned what I chose to carry to a reasonable list of gear and food. There’s no camp chair, novel or bottle of wine in my pack. Even so, the sudden weight loss leaves me feeling a little vulnerable.

But this is a test, I tell myself. And regardless of what I’ve left behind, I won’t be like Coup and subsist on a diet of dates, dried mango, buffalo jerky and desiccated kelp for three days.

The straps start to dig

We leave Kennedy Meadows at the southernmost tip of the Sierra in Sequoia National Forest, a mere dot on the 2,650-mile Mexico-to-Canada route that separates the sheep from the goats, where northbound thru-hikers leave the desert behind and take their first gulps of High Sierra air. A flat track through the scrub hugs the serpentine South Fork of the Kern River for a few miles before descending into Dome Land Wilderness, a remote tangle of granite spires and crags on high ridgelines, visible at each turn.

As we clip along, I’m already feeling the early season pinch of the pack pressing into my shoulders. We stop to stock up on water at a bend in the river.

“You lighten up your pack, you lighten up your shelter and you lighten up your sleeping bag.” It’s Coup’s mantra, and it reverberates through my brain. “Now you’re going to move quicker between spots, and you’re going to have less stress on your feet.”

So I really should sweat the small stuff, like water bottles. Coup points out that my three Lexan 1-quart bottles weigh almost a pound -- empty. His two plastic water bottles, which you can buy at any 7-Eleven, weigh next to nothing and hold roughly the same amount of water.

“There’s an awful lot of companies trying to make people think that the world is a very dangerous place and you need all this stuff to be safe and to be comfortable,” Coup says of his competitors. “Frankly, if that were true, I would stay home.”

Seven miles down the trail, the scrub gives way to a ghost forest of charred pinyon pines, burned five years ago in the Manter fire. We decide to camp at the edge of Rockhouse Basin amid these blackened sentinels. I find a flat spot above the trail where two boulders offer shelter in case a dead snag falls in the middle of the night. Coup has staked out a spot about 20 feet away on the other side of the trail.

As I spread out my ground cloth and start freeing gear that’s been imprisoned inside stuff sacks, I wonder if I could be a 16-pounder. Or am I a willing victim of retailers that fill my pack and empty my wallet? Am I playing it too safe? With the marks from my pack frame still fresh on my skin, I stroll over to see how the other half camps.

Coup unfurls a rain poncho. With his trekking poles, he configures the poncho into a shelter -- careful to leave enough space for him to see the stars. His ground cover is a paper-thin emergency blanket that he has cut in half. He similarly uses just half of a sleeping pad, with his legs supported by his 1 1/2 -pound pack, emptied of most of its contents. He spreads his down sleeping bag on top.

For dinner, I normally would heat up some soup, but tonight I decide to stick with hummus and pita bread. Coup, meanwhile, gnaws on dried mango and bits of kelp (which, he points out, replenishes salts and other nutrients). Strangely, I find that I’m not hankering for the hot meal. Maybe I could have left the stove and fuel canister behind.

I do miss my hairbrush, though. I mentally run through each castoff item sitting in my car at the trail head and wonder what John Muir would think of me lumbering along with a 35-pound load. The master of high-altitude wanderlust supposedly tramped through the trailless Sierra with little more than a blanket and some flour to make biscuits. Freed from his belongings, he wrote eloquently about what he observed on his wanderings through the Range of Light. So why am I scratching my head over a hairbrush?

A century after Muir, the lightweight revolution began in earnest. Ray Jardine and his wife, Jenny, hiked the Pacific Crest Trail each carrying less than 10 pounds -- not counting food and water -- at any given time. In 1992 the former aerospace engineer penned the seminal “Pacific Crest Trail Hiker’s Handbook,” which schooled long-distance hikers in how to trim every possible ounce from their packs, a philosophy nicknamed “the Ray way.”

“The standard backpacking method with its profusion of heavy-duty equipment actually prevents us from reaching our full potential as accomplished wilderness enthusiasts,” Jardine writes in the introduction to his updated guide called “Beyond Backpacking.” “The all-inclusive ‘everything-but-the-kitchen-sink’ approach only detracts from our outings. I am not promoting minimalism, but simply a reduction in what is not necessary. And I have found that this reduction, when thoughtfully and skillfully done, actually enhances both our safety and comfort.”

So why does the weight debate evoke such passion? Who really cares how much stuff anyone schleps into the woods? The truth is we all have hard time parting with stuff -- even when we lug it around on our backs. Coup would say clever marketing drives our urge to load up. But I think it’s more personal than that. Tossing a cappuccino maker or hairbrush into your pack provides some psychic comfort in the wilderness. Finding a balance between the raw experience of the outdoors and what we want versus what we need may be a bigger component of the journey than we think.

Backpack smackdown

The next morning I claw at my hair, put on my cap and pack up. Coup and I decide to press out the remaining 10 or so miles to Chimney Peak Campground, where we’ve parked a second car. Because we won’t hit a spring for most of the day, we fill all of our water bottles before leaving the river and start to climb the steeply sloped edges of the narrow trail.

Within a short distance we discover that each tree in this dead forest seems to have fallen, blocking our way. I cinch my backpack and climb up and over the thick log in the middle of the trail, but as I look ahead, I see there’s another and another and another. Clearly the harsh winter has taken its toll on the trees.

For the next few hours my pack goes off and on as I make my way through the twisted mass of branches and roots, sometimes crawling upslope or down to get around the fallen trees. If ever a test was devised for the virtues of packing light, this would be it. With each unsteady move, the pack bites into my back. Coup, on the other hand, never removes his snug-fitting rig, easily maneuvering through the debris. Occasionally I surrender my pride, and he helps me haul my load up and over the blowdowns. Score one point for the lightweight.

By the time we reach a summit and clear the forest, my legs feel rubbery from all the tree vaulting, but the test isn’t over yet. Spreading across the trail is a grainy sheet of hard, crusty snow. My feet lose traction as we start to plod our way across. Coup doesn’t seem to have as much trouble; perhaps it’s his lightweight trail shoes. Eventually we descend to a forest of scrub oaks and vines.

That’s when Coup delivers the bad news. First the downed trees, then the snow, and now, he says, we’re going in the wrong direction. We’re heading, according to his compass, west, and we should be making our way southeast. We also should have reached the car by now. We backtrack, and then, with night falling, decide to cut our losses and bed down amid shrubs and sagebrush in a spot I still can’t find on the map.

I have a cold dinner of string cheese, tofu and pita -- Coup hasn’t yet run out of dried mango -- when I remember that we never made it to the spring. Maybe Mother Nature has her own test in mind.

I check my pack; I’ve got one quart of water. Mr. GoLite, however, has none. I offer to share, but Coup waves me off. Instead he finds a snow field where he scratches down under the surface and nibbles handfuls of watery snow.

Score one for the heavyweight.

The final numbers

So was the adventure, this friendly competition, a draw?

In the morning we vow to stay on the trail until we find the car or walk all the way to Los Angeles trying.

Now the air is drier, the terrain less chiseled. We glide through canyons and finally arrive at the long-awaited spring.

A couple of miles later we reach signs for the campground where the car is parked and discover that we hadn’t overshot our destination; we simply hadn’t gone far enough.

Back at Kennedy Meadows, I drag out the scale. Coup’s pack weighs a mere 8 pounds. I’m lighter than when I started, but my pack is still four times heavier than his.

“Who has carried the heaviest load up Everest?” Coup asks me as we pack up to leave. It’s a question I’ve heard from him before, part of his pitch. But I play along.

The team that dragged the Imax camera up the world’s highest mountain? Or Sir Edmund Hillary?

Then comes the punch line: “Who knows,” Coup asks rhetorically, “and who cares?”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Get the lead out

Some tips on how to start downsizing your load

Think big: Lighten up the items that weigh the most -- starting with your tent, sleeping bag and pack.

Think ahead: Bring only what you need -- and what you know how to use.

Think twice: Use your gear for more than one purpose. The down jacket you wear around camp can also provide extra warmth when draped over a summer sleeping bag.

Think smart: Compare lightweight lines offered by GoLite, Marmot, Black Diamond, Mountainsmith, MSR, Osprey and other companies. Talk to the pros at free gear clinics, such as one offered May 31 at Adventure 16 in West L.A.

-- Mary Forgione

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

A bunch of items that just don’t add up to much

GEAR

Demetri Coupounas carried just 16 pounds for three days (it helps that he used gear his company makes). So what was in his pack?

ALSO

2 fleece hats

1 pair women’s lightweight trekking poles (carried or used with shelter)

1 pair lightweight gloves

Sun hat

Ground sheet (half of

a space blanket)