The Eternal Lightness of Backpacking

Tarp shelter, October backpack bowhunting.

The Eternal Lightness of Backpacking
Ultralight is nothing new
by Drew YoungeDyke

To read most backpacking resources, you would think that the ultralight concept is as modern as the internet. New synthetic fabrics are introduced each year which allow backpackers to continually reduce pack weight with minimal losses in function. Innovators create new lightweight pack and shelter designs each day, but the concept is as old as our species. 

Ötzi, the “Iceman” mummy found in 1991 in Italy’s Ötztal Alps, may have been the first documented “ultralight” backpacker. He lived over 5,000 years ago. Items found with him included a hazel wood backpack frame, a bow stave, a quiver, arrows, a knife, a hatchet, a net, a prehistoric lighter, various tools, and birchbark containers theorized to be lightweight alternatives to pottery. Scientists think he may have been a hunter, a prospector, or a shepherd; whichever his profession, he carried a thoughtfully selected overnight kit. That he chose birchbark containers over heavier pottery indicates a conscious consideration of his pack weight, and a preference for the lightweight alternative. 

Here in Michigan, the Odawa travelled lightly in canoes up and down the coast of Michigan between their summer residence at Little Traverse Bay and their winter homes, which ranged from Chicago to the Muskegon River. According to Andrew J. Blackbird, an Odawa chief who wrote History of the Ottawa and Chippewa Indians of Michigan in 1887, they carried light cedar poles in their canoes. When they camped on shore each night, they stretched marsh reed mats or sewn flags over the cedar poles to make small, portable, waterproof wigwams – tents, basically - which were lighter to carry than the larger permanent birchbark wigwams they lived in at home.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, numerous treatises, magazines, and guidebooks were published about wilderness travel. The writer and outdoorsman George Washington Sears, pen name Nessmuk, wrote in his seminal 1884 treatise Woodcraft, “Go light; the lighter the better, so that you have the simplest materiel for health, comfort, and enjoyment.” 

The 1910 Boy Scout’s Hike Book outlined a scout kit that weighs 23 pounds, and described the nineteenth century northwoods pack-sack kit which weighed no more than 30 pounds. Horace Kephart, in 1919’s Camping and Woodcraft, described numerous light tents and a simple tarp-tent to be used for “shifting” camps, when “cumbersome affairs are out of the question.” 

Kephart spent pages on the most lightweight and waterproof materials of the day to be used for tent construction, at that time waterproofed silk, which reminds me of modern blog posts about dyneema and ripstop nylon. He described pack/shelter and sleeping bag/pack combos, though he doesn’t give them a very ringing endorsement, and even a 7-pound European pack kit, though he didn’t recommend it for use in deep wilderness. For a 10-day solo hunting trip in fall weather, he outlined a 28-pound pack, 42 with provisions, but when you consider that he allotted eight pounds for his sleeping bag, you realize that it really was a lightweight pack for the available materials. 

My own ultralight obsession began in high school during football practices when we had to run up and back down a sand hill before every water break. Soon I replaced my 15-oz. cleats for 10-oz. versions that looked like soccer shoes, my one-inch-thick foam hip pads were replaced with lighter hard-foam ones half as thick, and I traded my bulky running back/linebacker pads for quarterback pads which weighed much less but definitely allowed me to feel the full brunt of defensive ends’ fury after I made an option pitch. Despite the reduced impact protection, I felt a definite advantage running up that sand hill four times a day. When I began backpacking, I applied the same principles and compiled a lightweight, if not ultralight, kit, due to the ridiculous prices charged for modern ultralight materials. By taking into account the principles described in these century-plus-old texts, though, a light pack can be assembled with the gear you probably already own. Most of the texts are available online through Google Books due to expired copyrights. 

While packs of 25-30 pounds wouldn’t be considered ultralight now, they were definitely ultralight in their day. The modern obsession with light pack weight may sometimes seem like a fad akin to barefoot running, but it’s really neither modern nor a fad. From 5,000 year-old Ötzi substituting birchbark for pottery, Michigan Odawa canoeists substituting woven reed mats for birchbark, or a modern backpacker substituting a sil-nylon tarp for a dome tent, the principle hasn’t changed since Nessmuk told us to “Go Light.”

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