Great post!!! It's first and foremost about getting out - gear is merely the means to an end.

Hi, I'm Glenn, and I'm a gearaholic. It's been almost a week since my last purchase...

And that purchase was a stainless steel pot, an experiment. In the past, I've gone through a lot of gear - I've been the guy out on the trail with all the latest-and-greatest, shiny new stuff. Not because I wanted to achieve a particular look, but because, for me, playing with gear became something of a sub-hobby (and I was fortunate enough to be able to indulge myself.)

However, after flirting with light weight as an ends unto itself, I'm starting to slide back to the overall concept of convenience and comfort. I'll never return to my 45 pound weekend loads; like OM so aptly says, I'm old enough that I just can't do that anymore. But I'm thinking that I may end up preferring the heavier Hubba to the Carbon Reflex, Prolite Plus to NeoAir, and so forth - resulting in a load of 23 pounds instead of 20 for a summer weekend.

In the end, though, it is about getting out there - and where "there" is, isn't as important as getting out. Sure, we all love the Isle Royale, Yellowstone, CDT, or AT "big trips." But, we can lose a lot of valuable time sitting at home dreaming about those places. (I'm as guilty as everyone else on that score.) It's better to go to that "boring" little state park, half an hour from home, than to go nowhere. Several times, I've grudgingly done that when a trip to the AT, a day's drive away, fell through - and sure enough, something happened at the lowly state park that wowed me: I'd get within 15 feet of a buck with a creek gurgling between us, or walk through a flock of 300 geese sleeping on the public swimming beach on a crisp, clear January morning - or come across the snow-covered fresh carcass of a young doe that had clearly succumbed to starvation in the last 48 hours, and suddenly realize that, if we're going to hunt the natural predators to extinction, we also have a duty to step in to manage the herd to prevent the cruelty of overpopulation and starvation. (Not a particularly elegant solution, and one open to abuse, but it did change my perception of hunting and hunters.)

So, what about all the "old" stuff that gets set aside by the dabbling in the latest and greatest? In my case, a lot of it has ended up on someone else's back (a couple of nieces, a nephew, my son, some of my old Scouts, and some new friends), letting them get on the trail a bit sooner than they would have otherwise. Until it ceases to function, the age of the gear is irrelevant; I've had great trips with all manner of gear.