This is all you need to survive in the woods for five months

A little over two years ago when we first decided that we were going to hike the PCT, gear was one of the first things we started to research. We probably should have been ordering the guide books and making lists about all the logistics that would be involved with planning a 5 month hike, but backpacking gear is way cooler than all of that. We would get giddy over finding the lightest weight trekking poles, the best sleeping pads, or the coolest stove.

Conversations would go something like this:

“Hey check out these Titanium Sporks”

“Sweet, how much do the weigh?”

“.7oz each!”

“Those are rad! We should get them!”

“Yeah!”

Then we’d high five and feel pretty great about ourselves and our brand new Titanium Sporks.  However, after purchasing our gear, while reading something totally unrelated, we would often stumble across different (better) pieces of gear and feel terrible about our poor choices. Keeping your carrying weight down is extremely important on these types of backpacking trips. It is a trade-off between comfortable living and ease of hiking – finding the optimal balance for your personal needs is critical.

We would wind up spending hours and hours comparing our titanium sporks to 6 or 7 other types of eating utensils made from aluminum, plastic, or some fancy space polymer, and we’d read pages and pages of reviews on numerous backpacking forums and list serves, only confusing our options more.

The thing about reading all the reviews on every site is that people who do long distance backpacking are crazy, and one thing that these backpackers are particularly crazy about is their gear. People will write passionate 3-page rants about how their spork is the best damn spork out there and that other people who buy other sporks are idiots who waste their money. Or, people are idiots for carrying any spork at all: “Why not save yourself the .7 oz and eat out of your hands stupid? You have perfectly good hands to eat your meals out of.” (For the record we didn’t end up taking our titanium sporks. We found something lighter…)

After many, many, many hours and days of staring at the computer screen, sifting through the reviews of every spork/stove/tent/whatever, we finalized our gear… about two weeks ago (I write this a few days before leaving for the trail). And to be totally honest, there are still a few things we are not sure of yet. So for better or worse, below you will find a portion of the Excel file that we have been using these past few years to sort our gear. I assure you that the file we actually use is much much messier and harder to read than the one below.

The gear is weighed by ounces and divided into the areas where we’ll be carrying it (for example, we won’t be carrying our rain pants in the desert), except at the bottom of each section where the total is in pounds. Weights are only included for gear for the sections in which we’ll be carrying it – e.g., our fleece jackets will weigh 0oz (will not be carried) in Southern California, but 8oz in Washington.

Don’t Forget Socks