Those monstererous 7 pound backpacks..

You know the kind. the kind we love to avoid here. I have one I use, for *winter*, and now for hunting camp. Moose draws in my usual area have gotten too lean, and I'm heading north of lesser slave lake next week in search of swamp donkeys.

As a result I've space sized my hunting kit down to minimal for me and my dad. and was packing up the gear tonight. The capacity of the monster bag shocks me.. let's see I've stuffed in

a golite shangri-la 3 with stakes and pole
a wood stove to heat the above
stove pipe, stove boot, stove legs, etc.
firestarting gear
Svea 123 with sigg-tourist-like potset
750 ml bottle of white gas
4 oz bottle of alchol for priming
Gigantic silnylon tarp (about 12x15) with stakes and lines
speer hammock
2 sleeping bags (MEC -10C, and exped wallcreeper for hammock bottom)
8x10 silnylong tarp with stakes and lines
ID silponcho.
Ursack with 4 days dehydrated food
My sleeping clothes.

and I'm not even into the extension collar yet..

It's no wonder people who normally backpack with these end up taking expresso machines and portable showers... It always appals me how much crap I can jam in this thing whenever I get it out.

Phat,
Why bring along the Svea at all? It seems to me you can use the wood stove or just build a fire outside of the tent? Even if you bring along your Penny stove, that would help a little....am i missing something, here?

BF

I have a 6lb. big pack that is now storage for all my other gear. It's a mid 80's Lowe Specialist II...good as new.
Curious why a tent AND a hammock? I understand the Svea and the wood stove.

My wood stove is fine to boil my AGG 3 cupper full of water, but
with two people I want the capacity to boil a little bit more, and quicker, for breakfast in the morning.

I will hammock, as long as it's not godawful freezing. My dad will sleep in the tent with the stove.

Dad AND a Svea stove - it doesn't get much more nostalgic (or better) than that!

Don't worry about the extra weight of the stove and cookkit - enjoy the time with your dad. You'll have a lot more ultralight hikes ahead of you, so hike heavy and have a good time. (My guess is that it's not entirely about the hunting, either.)

It aint even a lot of hiking with that big rig - more like how to get it down to a managable size so spike camp can go with us on a couple ATV's, find a good spot and hunt from there as dayhikes (the ATV's come into play if we get something because a moose is darn big for two people to deal with.

And no, it's not all about the hunting.

I would think you need a lot of stuff (books too) up there - how much daylight do you have anyway? What do you do for the rest of the hours when it is dark? Can you really sleep 14 hours? This is what I am amazed about. I get cabin fever down here when it starts to get dark by 7PM.

Thank goodness for my still near perfect, original Montana made Dana Astralplane.

It does come in handy; like when you're the pack-mule on a 19 day thru-hike in the Winds with your two kids age 9 and 5 and your wife. It's amazing how much volume, food for 4 people for 19 days takes up, let alone a 4 man tent.



Now that the kids (and the old wife) are gone, I still find that 70-80% of my pack's volume is still just food/fuel. The problem now is, I like to stay out almost twice as long with my new wife. My pack weighs more than our shelter, which I carry, and my sleeping bag/sleeping mat combined; but the volume lets me carry FOOD, the life giving substance that let's us stay way out in bc.

This is 30 days of homemade dried meals in their Ursacks and that doesn't include the 1 gal of fuel for 2 for 30 days that we didn't quite go through. The next shot is our packs, loaded for 30 days on our 2nd night out. No room for a wood stove, or an Ipod/ Iphone, or even a GPS. Not even a drop of booze . The only "luxuries" I take, that won't even fit in my pack are my flyrod and my camera.





7 lb packs are as much a necessary part of BP'ng, as are all of the other ways that we reduce everything else to the minimum so we can stay out for a month at a time or enjoy our back country family time.

Have a great trip with your dad !

actually I seldom take a book to hunting camp. most evenings are spent with dinner and just discussion around the caveman T.V, or if the weather is foul the wood stove in the hot tent.

Days are a bit different than backpacking though. Backpacking I will get up at first light, eat, pack up, walk all day, and usually stop with enough time to cook dinner and set up camp in the light, relax a bit and go to bed when it is dark. Hunting camp I get up and aim to be walking out of camp with a rifle a half hour before sunrise. The way we like to work is to get camp into an area where we can walk out of camp and be hunting. Returning is similar, so again, it's unusal not to be making dinner in the dark, because you were in the field until sunset or a bit after. So while the daylight hours are shorter, the days are longer. if I actually was hunting in the summertime light hours we get up here I'd never get any sleep!

I have a pair of old Kelty frame packs including a super tioga. I also have a Kelty spectra cloud 6800 which has about the same volume and weighs a third as much but is an internal. For really heavy loads you can't beat the big external frames.

In salmon country, fishermen carry these to carry out their fish. One guy said to me "ever try to carry two 40 pounds salmon in yer hands?
Jim

Yeah, you're the exception. someone actually using an expedition sized pack for what it was meant for. That many days out unresupplied is *heavy* and big.

Most expedition sized packs get used for weekenders.