Pack Weight

Over this past weekend, we started taking a look at all the gear that we have, and gear that we still need. I put together a spreadsheet listing the various items that both Casey and I will be carrying (or are currently planning on carrying); tent, sleeping bag and pad, cooking equipment, extra clothing, first aid equipment, and personal items all included. I started getting curious as to what our approximate base pack weights would be (e.g. minimum weight of all equipment, not including any water or food).We used a combination of information on the internet, and our little digital food scale to get the weight of as many items as we could and input those into the spreadsheet. The table below is our current baseline pack contents and weights. There are a few estimations in there, so it’s not exact, but pretty close.

After doing some research online, it looks like an ideal base pack weight without any food or water would be around 21-25 pounds, so we might have some re-arranging and re-planning to do. Water will add about 6.5 pounds daily (water weighs 2.2 pounds per liter, and we each plan on carrying 3 liters at a time), and food should be about another 3-5 pounds depending on how many days we’re carrying (assuming about 1.5-2 pounds of food per person per day). This would bring the current total to almost 40 pounds for Alex, and about 35 pounds for Casey, when we’re full of food and water. Some things we’ll be looking at doing over the next few weeks will be to reduce our pack weights, either by cutting out items we don’t really need, or swapping out heavier items with lighter alternatives. After doing our 100 miles on the PCT last summer, we learned quite a bit about what we need and what we don’t need, and that’s partially how we got to where we’re at today.

As I said, we’ll be working over the next few weeks to lower our own pack weights, but I’m a bit excited (and a littler nervous) about the apparent shakedown service that we’ll encounter at Mountain Crossings at Neels Gap in northern Georgia. A shakedown is where they’ll take the entire contents of a hiker’s pack, and help them determine what is unneeded, and what could be swapped out for lighter items.

That’s it for now. We’ll keep everyone updated on our packing efforts!