[pct-l] To waterproof or not to waterproof (ye old sleeping

[Diane Soini]

To you and everyone thinking as you have been (and as I had also as I was prepping) you all really just need to get out on the trail and go already! All these crazy schemes you are coming up with will go home as soon you get to a post office.

Seriously, gear is good enough the way it comes out of the box. A little seam-sealer on your tent and you’re good to go.

The awesome part of hiking the trail is how you really don’t need that much. Whatever you have doesn’t even need to be that fancy. Whatever you don’t have is rarely missed and if it is missed, you’ll figure out how to acquire it. Believe it or not, you can hike for several weeks feeling a little too cold all the time or getting rained on with piss-poor rain gear or whatever other thing you haven’t done the best job setting yourself up with. You aren’t going to the moon. There’s a store or the Internet and a post office coming up soon.

I remember a day in Oregon when I met a hiker just starting out on a backpack trip. He was so excited to see someone with lightweight gear. He really wanted to discuss gear with me. This brand, that brand, all these numbers. I really didn’t care anymore. I hadn’t cared about gear for a really long time. It held absolutely no interest for me. All I cared about were the flowers and my feet and my food fantasies. If he’d wanted to discuss lunch with me, that would have been a totally different story. I could have discussed lunch all day long. In fact, I bumped into Billy Goat on the trail once and forget about the view, we talked at length about which meal is better to eat at Drakesbad.

(He votes for lunch, I vote for breakfast. The best is dinner, camp nearby, and then breakfast so you get two of the best meals on the trail in a row.)


On Mar 1, 2014, at 10:00 AM, pct-l-request at backcountry.net wrote:

> Message: 3
> Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 12:16:55 -0700
> From: "Paint Your Wagon" <n801yz at hotmail.com>
> Subject: [pct-l]  To waterproof or not to waterproof (ye old sleeping

> Glad to have the list serve- for the great sounding board that it is.
> 
> Thanks again,
> 
> <>Paint<>