Somebody posted a question at Google Groups about what stuff to get when just starting out. Hilarity ensued. Well, not exactly but at least a flame war didn’t break out, despite this provocation to the ultralight crowd:

While Ultralighting seems to be oh-so-chic, you might hate it. Ultralighting is the practice of transferring the palpable misery of an overloaded weight on your back to a series of tiny miseries in
every other aspect of your trip.

This is true to a point. Alcohol stoves are a pain compared to canister stoves. Full-length inflatable sleeping pads are better than just about everything else. A free-standing tent with a bathtub floor and noseeum netting is like the Waldorf on dirt. Throw in a bottle of pinot noir and you’re in hiker heaven. Provided you aren’t going very far.

While going light can get you farther and faster down the trail, the real appeal of it is the challenge of figuring how how little you can get by with. In North America most of us live in such abundance that we assume by default that more is better, that gear must be manufactured at near slave wages in China and sold at generous markup at REI, and that we must have name brands like The North Face stitched on all our stuff. It’s totally counterintuitive to minimiize, which makes ultralighting more of an intellectual exercise.

Another of the cool things about going light is discovering there are little boutique companies like Gossamer Gear and Oware in which people are building the stuff themselves and selliing it at reasonable prices online.

In any case, backpacking will always put you in grass-is-greener mode when you get home and realize you didn’t use the 10-ounce stake mallet that had seemed so essential; or you try to boil water on an alcohol stove when you’ve forgotten the wind screen (times like this make a JetBoil look like a gift from the gods.)

I like mixing up heavy and light loads because each one makes me appreciate the other.