If you listen to one of my day hiking friends, I am a gear snob.

But what I really am is older, and more aware of limitations and precautions and possibilities. I tell her when she is dead dog tired and dragging a$$ the last three miles of an eight mile hike - you need a better pack to distribute the weight on your body more effectively, you need better food for the sustained effort that is hiking, you need to carry less water and rely on a filter especially when nine tenths of the hike is along rivers and streams. Also she needs to think about what's in the pack. Your legs won't feel like they're falling off if you pay a little more attention to what's on the back and how it's balanced.

But she doesn't listen; she thinks I'm advising her to risk her life by using a filter (????) and wants to carry liter upon liter of tap water from home. She eats fruit salad for lunch. She doesn't carry first aid other than a few squares of moleskin. She doesn't carry emergency supplies, a whistle, or any kind of water purification scheme. I offered to loan her one of my packs. She has a book bag. No, thank you, I'd rather carry four liters of water in Nalgenes that bump my thighs with every step.

I told her that hiking Half Dome in a day, even if you're with a group, should entail packing as if you're going to spend the night out there - at least carry warm clothes to throw on and a headlamp to keep hiking after dark. Given her observed .4 miles per hour pace, it's gonna be a long walk.

Nope.

I wish I were as indestructible as I used to be at her age. She thinks I walk easily twenty minutes ahead of her, uphill and downhill, because I'm in better shape - yet she's the one going to the gym and half my age. She's the one without extra pounds on the midriff. I'm just that gear snob who insists on throwing in water filter, first aid and extra food, into a pack that actually carries the weight in the right place. I carried half the water she did and tanked up when I ran out. I brought powerbars and trail mix and other things to maintain adequate energy levels. What do I know?

Well, okay. Bonk if you want to - but you'll have a better chance of making it to Half Dome my way, sorry. Not hubris, just observed behavior coupled with an idea of the level of difficulty of the hike. She crashed and burned at the top of Nevada Falls. That's barely a third of the way in.

I'm not a gear snob - I just hate seeing people suffer on the trail, and I don't want to suffer either. I stopped to help a very sick "scout" - he was not a real Boy Scout, but part of some (I suspect) church group. Not prepared at all, out of water, stomach cramps, no food, and I just wonder what would have happened to him had we been further up the trail in less tourist-traveled miles of wilderness. Trying to wait out a temporary ailment with no supplies could be deadly, if he had to wait much past dusk. So while I won't go so far as to lecture like some <img src="/forums/images/graemlins/crazy.gif" alt="" /> I will say that preparing for the worst has helped me enjoy my hiking a lot more than marching forth with a windbreaker and a granola bar, wearing jeans and assuming things would go perfectly. I assumed a lot when I was younger. I may have been lucky then; not going to count on it any more.