A few years ago I walked the John Muir Trail in the highest parts of the Sierra Nevada mountains from Yosemite Valley to Whitney Portal with my then-girlfriend. Actually, the trail technically ends at the top of Mount Whitney but unless you own a helicopter it’s hard to arrange a pickup from there. It is a total of about 220 miles. We actually didn’t do it in one go since I didn’t have that much vacation. We did the northern half one summer and the southern half the following summer, going in and coming out at Bishop Pass.
Whenever I had been hiking before I had been out for a couple of days at most, so never really reached anywhere that was too isolated for the weekenders. This time it was different and we were in some of the most beautiful valleys you can imagine in complete isolation. A spiritual experience as well.
Even hiking in the wilderness does not allow an escape from the reach of modern technology. There has been a revolution in clothing over the last twenty years: fleece, GoreTex, lycra, Paramo. All light, quick-drying, warm and breathable. But for long-distance hiking the real high-tech revolution has been over weight. In the past, hikers would carry rucksacks weighing 50 pounds. Ray Jardine, an aerospace engineer turned world-class climber turned long-distance hiker changed everything. He developed a low weight philosophy over many long-distance hikes such as doing the Pacific Crest Trail from Mexico to Canada in only 5 months. And then he wrote Trail Life that is now the bible for Ray-Way hikers who carry as little as possible (Ray republishes the book every several years, but confusingly changes the title each time so the version I used as actually this out-of-print one). Instead of heavy frame rucksacks, they can be made from parachute nylon and weigh less than a pound. Use the sleeping pad as part of the rucksack structure. Don’t carry warm clothes and a warm sleeping bag since you can wear the clothes in the sleeping bag and so carry one that only weighs a pound or so. Don’t carry a tent with its heavy poles, carry a waterproofed parachute-nylon tarpaulin and tie it to trees. Carry a key-chain flashlight, the smallest Swiss army knife you can get, a single pan (titanium of course), no change of clothes except socks.
We didn’t go as far as some hikers and worry about cutting the labels out of our clothes, the handles off our toothbrushes or discarding the distant parts of our maps. Our packs probably weighed about 12 pounds plus food, water and fuel. But they were lighter than I have ever hiked with before. So instead of hiking 10 miles per days and feeling tired, we were hiking around 20 miles most days. On the longest day we went 23 miles, partially because the rain made stopping for a meal or a rest unpleasant so we just kept going. That day we discovered another Ray Jardine innovation since we had taken an umbrella with us. Unfortunately we only took one but it was clear that whoever had the umbrella was happy, without even having to put up their hood. Whoever didn’t have the umbrella was miserable, especially when the rain turned to hail.
One thing that is difficult to avoid carrying is a bear-barrel. Yosemite bears have got wise to the old way of fooling them which was to tie your rucksack on one end of a rope and hoist it into the trees. Eventually even bears worked out how to bite through the other end of the rope; or send up a cub to inch out along the bendy branch; or just break the branch with their weight. Yosemite’s policy of moving problem bears from near the touristy valley itself, out to isolated areas of the park has meant that the knowledge of how to defeat bear-bagging spread quickly. So now a bear barrel is mandatory. This is a cylindrical container that has a recessed lid that is held in place by screws. There are no edges for the bears to get a tooth or a claw into, so they cannot get the food out even though they know that it is in the barrel. The old ones were plastic and fairly heavy. High-tech to the rescue. Newer ones are built from aerospace composites and machined aluminum, but they still weigh over a pound, which is sacrilege and probably makes them the heaviest single thing we carried. And that is before filling them up with 10 pounds of food to last for about six days. The food is all dehydrated and the volume of it is just as much of a challenge as the weight since it all must fit into the bear barrels. In the end we never even saw a bear, which is unusual. When I have hiked nearer to Yosemite the campsite has always been visited in the night. Of course doing long distances each day leads to virtuous circle on the food front: less food is required and so the pack can be lighter still, so you can go still further per day.
Another guru of modern long-distance hiking is an Englishman who lives in Scotland called Chris Townsend. He is author of The Advanced Backpacker, another standard book on backpacking, somewhat less extreme than Ray Jardine (and clearly a lot less weird as a person). We met an Englishman on the trail, interested that we were the only other people that he had met on the trail hiking in Teva sandals. Not using hiking boots but sandals or running shoes is another way of hiking further in a day since most hiking boots are like adding weights to your feet to slow yourself down. When we found out he lived in Scotland we asked him if he knew Chris Townsend. Surprise, surprise, he was Chris Townsend.
We didn’t take the ultimate piece of high-tech gear with us, the GPS unit. That seemed both unnecessary since route finding is easy in summer (not so in Winter when the trail is hidden by snow) and back then they were both expensive and heavy.
I’m actually hiking right now, in Romania (although Transylvania sounds so much more, well, vampirish). I’ll let you know if we find Dracula (and, for once, I don’t mean the DRC).