Jack said:

oldranger replied

I agree with oldranger, with the caveat that there's no common consensus on what is "just right" --- you have to figure that out for yourself.

Perhaps you will not actually want to get to the point of ultralight, or at least I suggest that you don't start with the assumption of something that aggressive. Yes, there are even "super ultralight" folks out there, but I don't think there are that many, and I also suspect that most of them limit their SUL ways to the more gentler summer hiking months and/or locations. "Light" is the range that I fall into, and I find that to be the sweet spot for me (10 - 20 pound base weight, which varies by the specific trip).

If you can make true UL (or even SUL) work for you, excellent, but I'd have a hard look at (complete) gear lists of folks that do this and figure out what sort of 'style' and attitude shifts you would need to work through to be safe and acceptably comfortable in doing so.

It's a bit of a conundrum for a beginner, I think, as you don't want to go through the expensive multi-phase approach of buying heavier gear and then replacing it bit by bit with lighter gear, BUT --- to be sufficiently safe and comfortable as an actual ultralight backpacker (base weight under 10 pounds) requires significant experience. Experience that you need an initial set of gear to obtain ...

Now if by the word "ultralight" you just mean "something vaguely but significantly lighter than what I started with", then as Gilda Radner used to say as one of her Saturday Night Live characters: "never mind". In practice I do find that many (most?) people who toss around the term "ultralight" mean by it something vague, and not tied to a specific baseweight.