If you’re interested in laying down some of your backpacking burden, you can find plenty of advice in bookstores and online. (Type “ultralight backpacking” into the YouTube search box and you’ll get over 3,100 videos.) But no one synthesizes the opposite poles of obsessive-compulsive, shorten-and-drill-out-your-toothbrush hysteria and utterly wooden affect like Steve Green, owner of Only The Lightest Camping Equipment. Green has just posted a new set of instructional videos to his web site (hikelight.com). That brings the site’s total video library to 82, covering everything from the basic concept of ultralight backpacking to hundreds of tips for shaving a gram here and a gram there from your kit.
Some of his suggestions are exceedingly practical, from an economic and weight-saving perspective. (Part of the less-is-more appeal of ultralight camping is that it steers you away from big investments in new gear. “No impulse purchases at the backpack store!” Green admonishes.) Some are purely surprising: despite his fixation on trimming every gram, he suggests that you consider taking an umbrella to ward off rain and sun.
Other ideas feel like they nudge up to the line of being peculiar: how much weight do you really save snipping off the long ends of your shoelaces? The excess strapping on your new, 1.5 pound ultralight backpack? And what might seem just a little extreme on the written page seems oddly fanatical when it’s suggested by the deadpan Green.
Still, we find his presence hypnotic and his ideas—on balance—insightful. Check him out.
Photo of ultralight contrarians by Dsw3131 via Wikimedia Commons
