Storing Backpacking Gear
Keep your pack, sleeping bag, tent, cooking stove and utensils, and camping essentials in one spot.
Read my article to find about my latest backpacking mistake. Has anyone else ever done something like this?
Everyone who ever goes on a backpack trip should read this article, and not do what I did.
I left after work last Thursday, with my two border collies, to spend several days up in a secluded wilderness area. I made it to the trailhead late in the evening, and had time to hike a mile up,before advancing darkness made me leave the trail and set up camp in a grove of spruce a couple of hundred yards above a stream.
Everything was just about perfect - the silence and solitude, the peaceful murmuring of the stream, the cold air, the smell of the spruce and fir, the joy of my dogs to be out in the wild with me, their favorite person.
I had already eaten during the drive up, but decided to make some hot chocolate before I retreated to the tent. I retrieved my stove out of my food bag, and then reached in for my pot to boil water. It wasn't there.
As I was cursing myself for my damn stupidity, I wondered what I could use to improvise a pot of boiling water. It didn't take long to realize that it can't be done - very few things will stand the heat of a stove without melting, except a metal pot. Mine was sitting in the dishwasher at home.
There is a lesson in this:
Always store your backpacking gear in the same location - be it a closet, or part of the garage, or in a corner of the basement. Never separate it. To break that rule is to invite disaster. The philosophy behind it is that if you keep your pack, sleeping bag, tent, cooking stove and utensils, and everything else in one spot, you are less likely to leave something behind.
I broke my rule and paid for it.
The other smart thing to do, which I also neglected by being stupid, is to have a list of items to take backpacking, and review it before you head out.
I didn't let it ruin my trip. In the morning I tied my food up in a tree, left all my gear at the campsite, and hiked down to my truck. It only took me and hour to go to a store and buy a pot and be back at the trailhead. I quickly loaded my pack and was on the way to my backcountry destination by 9am.
The trip didn't start out as I would have liked, but I really don't have any complaints. I was the first one up the trail this spring, breaking snowbanks that covered the trail. My dogs and I camped upstream of a couple lakes, in a valley with a beautiful view of the snowcapped peaks rising above the spruce and fir forest. I didn't see another person until I was on the way back down the trail, three days later.
At night I heard Blue Grouse thumping, and in the morning I listed to the sweet song of Ruby-Crowned Kinglets high in the trees.
There is nothing like sitting around a campfire eating your breakfast and drinking hot chocolate when you look up to see the sun has risen, reflected on the mountains of the divide.
Check out my photos from the trip, to see what I mean about how the trip turned out ok.
But I am keeping an extra pot behind the seat in my pickup, just in case.
