Lighten Up Your Backpack: The Big Three

Six Moon Designs Lunar Solo Tarptent

Introduction

This is the second article in a 4 part series that provides backpackers with a set of easy to follow recommendations to reduce their base pack weight. The first article in the series, titled Lighten Up your Backpack: Weighing your Gear stressed the importance of purchasing a digital scale and taking the time to weigh all of your existing backpacking gear.

This article’s focus is on helping you reduce the weight of your Big Three: your tent, sleeping bag, and backpack, so that together they weight less than 9 lbs. Below, I recommend some lightweight alternatives in each of these areas that you should consider if you’re seriously trying to lighten up.

The Big Three

If you’ve finished weighing all of the items in your backpack and created a gear list, you’re now ready to start reducing your base pack weight. Looking at your list, the three heaviest items are probably your sleeping bag, tent and backpack. If you can reduce their weight to under 3  pounds each, you’ll be well on your way to a substantially lighter load. Keeping each of these components under 3 pounds might sound impossible to you today, but it is easily achievable.

Unfortunately, the only practical way to reduce the weight of the big three is to replace them with lighter alternatives.

Sleeping Bag

Let’s start with your sleeping bag. If it weighs more than 40 ounces, you should probably replace it. For 3 season camping, I recommend that you purchase a sleeping bag rated for 20 degrees F. Down sleeping bags are better than bags with synthetic fills because they are lighter and more compressible. Compressibility is important because it means that you can get away with a lower volume backpack, which can save you a lot of weight.

Western Mountaineering Ultralite 20 Sleeping Bag

A lot of experienced backpackers will tell you that the best 3 season down sleeping bags on the market are from Western Mountaineering. They retail for between $300 and $400. Down bags, from Montbell or Marmot, in the 10-20 degree F range, are a bit less expensive and but also high quality.

Buying a new sleeping bag is a big investment, but a good down bag can last well over 10 years. If you keep them clean and store them uncompressed, they’re an investment that will pay for itself over the long haul.

Tarptent Single-walled Tent – Squall 2

Tent

Now let’s switch to your shelter. If your 3 season tent weighs more than 40 ounces, you should replace it with a lighter weight alternative. This can be another area of huge weight savings for you. The best lightweight tents on the market are single-walled tents sold by Tarptent or Six Moon Designs and cost under $250. One of the nice things about these tents is that you can set them up using hiking poles instead of tent poles, which can help you avoid carrying even more weight. One and two person alternatives are available from these manufacturers, but unless you always backpack with a significant other, I recommend that you stick with the one-person version of these tents.

Single walled tents are just as watertight as tents that require a rain fly. The only real difference between the two is the degree of ventilation they provide. Single walled tents usually have extra mesh located between the tent’s base and walls and at the rear of the tent to promote greater airflow. The enhanced airflow dries most condensation that forms at night due to the moisture in your exhalations or from high humidity.

Hammocks or tarps can also be a lightweight alternatives to tents, but they have a narrower temperature range and are less adaptable in certain circumstances. My advice is to branch out to these after you purchase a single-walled tent.

Gossamer Gear Mariposa Plus Backpack

Backpacks

The last item you should put on a diet is your backpack because you won’t have a good idea about the volume you’ll really need until you replace your sleeping bag and tent. Chances are good however that a 4000 cu pack will handle just about any trip you plan on taking from a weekend section hike to an Appalachian Trail thru-hike.

Mainstream backpack weights have fallen rather substantially over the past few years so there are quite a few alternative packs that weigh between 2 and 3 lbs. to choose from like the Golite Pinnacle or the Granite Gear Varpor Trail. Personally, I prefer buying backpacks from ultralight cottage industry manufacturers like Gossamer Gear and Six Moon Designs, because they both provide high volume packs that weigh under 2l bs. and have features such as hip belt pockets and external mesh pockets that are unavailable on packs manufactured by mainstream manufacturers. They also provide far superior customer service and advice you can trust.

In addition, these backpacks come with pockets that let you use your sleeping pad as the backpack’s framesheet, adding rigidity to it and improving it’s ability to carry heavier loads. This eliminates almost all of the frame weight that makes traditional 5+ lb packs so heavy in the first place and let’s you use one piece of gear for multiple purposes, which will be the focus of my next article in this series.

Do the math

Let’s review some combinations of Big Three components to illustrate the weight savings that are possible. I’ve included a sleeping pad in the two examples that have a backpack that requires a sleeping pad to create extra frame-sheet rigidity. In each of these samples, I’ve listed the the weight of each component in ounces, the total number of ounces of all of the components together and their equivalents in terms of lbs.

Each of these examples shows you how easy it is to achieve significant weight savings, far beyond our original goal of reducing your Big Three to 9 lbs total.

The next article in this series will focus on using gear that can be used for multiple purposes to further trim your base gear weight.

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