RE: [pct-l] Heavy Hiking

["Brett Tucker" <blisterfree@hotmail.com>]

>From: "Kelly Miller" <aj7x@amsat.org>

>>Yes, Yes! Zero pack weight!  Well, let me see now... zero packweight would 
>>allow
>you to finish the trail in record time and outrun that nasty blizzard. 
>Don't
>need any water....With all that non-existent weight, you'll certainly make
>Manning before you get thirsty.  Then what will you do with the rest of the 
>day.

Actually, I would imagine that hiking with zero packweight would move the 
focus away from the walking, and toward fulfillment of the more essential 
needs of life. It would bring the concept of a "need" into exquisite focus, 
showing just how little the human animal requires to get by here on earth. 
And at the same time, how much we depend on those few requirements.

We require shelter, first and foremost. So we would require the skill to 
make or find that shelter, and the judgment to do so before a problem 
arises. We require water, so we would require the sixth sense of finding 
water without a map. And producing it when nature does not readily provide. 
We might require the skills of tracking, stalking or trapping, or perhaps 
foraging. And as long as our body temperature remained at 98.6, our blood 
contained the proper ratio of water, and our muscles had fuel to burn, then 
we might be most of the way there already.

Above all, a zero packweight journey would demand that we know the 
environment far better than we know the contents of any backpack. And that 
we know ourselves, and our abilities, far more intimately than the ways of 
modern living allow. When we do, then in a way nature becomes our backpack. 
But rather than carry that pack down the trail, she carries us - but only if 
we are light enough to be lifted.

I use "we" throughout here, but I don't mean to imply that we, or I, should 
attempt a zero packweight PCT thru-hike. That could be extremely foolish and 
dangerous. Then again, it could be pretty exceptional too. If it all worked 
out, of course. Good chance that it might not. Probably best to start with a 
fully loaded backpack, perhaps one assembled in China and advertised in the 
American media. In it would be our shelter, our water, our food, our needs 
and wants. And with these items, we could tread safely in the footsteps of 
wild creatures and the ghosts of human ancestry - those that know the earth 
like we know our modern technology.

Maybe I'm getting carried away. The point of "zero packweight" isn't 
necessarily to try it. The idea is to think about it, and to consider 
whether it might in fact be possible. When it becomes possible, then 
suddenly packweight becomes arbitrary. And when that happens, then I think 
all of the methods of backpacking go with it. Backpacking becomes a human 
convention, a way of delving into the natural world in whatever way, and to 
whatever degree. The focus, in the end, is nature. She'll let us part with 
everything in our pack, but all the backpacking equipment in the world won't 
work without her.

- Blisterfree


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