If told you that I take off for the Three Sisters Wilderness carrying about 5 pounds of gear, you would probably think I had joined Ray and was using a newspaper for a ground cloth and sleeping bag. I moved to Bend Oregon which is at 3,800 feet in the central Cascades in Central Oregon and that has dramatically affected my wilderness time.

Recently we went on a backpack trip, set up the tents, hung out, hiked around, ate dinner, took down the tents and went home, which took 2 more hours, and slept in our beds with our dogs at our feet.

Now consider the paragraph above closely before dismissing it. We live so close to the mountains and have so much responsibility at home that getting away for a night is almost impossible. But the above trip only lacked 3 features of a "standard" trip; we didn't spend the night on the mountain so we didn't have sleeping bags, pads, pillows or med kits. We didn't eat breakfast so we didn't carry it and we didn't need water for breakfast, AND We had really light packs - tent, sandwich, water bottle, and um legal recreational materials.

We had a few of the generic 10 essentials, some of which come in handy and some of which are an anachronism. Like compasses. Get a GPS, like does your telephone have a rotary dial or do you play 45 rpm ecords? No - well thats about how useful a map and compass is to most people or to everybody currently lost because the rule of compass navigation is "never get lost".

Anyway now that I live in the forest at 3,800 on a lava flow in the Cascades, I have adopted the local clothing. Cotton sweat pants, cotton hoody, cotton tee shirt, sorel boots and a cotton overcoat with a hood and wool lining. Frankly this is a desert - its pretty dry. Why spend the money on delcate camping fabrics? So since I dress this way at home, I also dress this way when I take the dogs for a walk on the mountain, or hike in for an afternoon, or kayak for that matter. Its not so much that "familiarity breeds contempt" so much as "familiarity means you know exactly what you will need". If I go skiing I wear fancy expensive clothes, or if do something that requires special equipment, I take it, but as I get a bit older I feel less compelled to don my patagonia stuff for a walk to the mail box.
Jim