What Earns Its Weight in the Pack

Trail crew teaches you to hate ounces before it teaches you anything about actual trail work. Three seasons of that and I still can’t pick up an object without some part of my brain converting it to a number. A paperback weighs about what a decent trowel weighs. A hardcover weighs about what a second climbing shell weighs, which is to say, you’d better have a real reason for bringing it.

The four miles up to the tower isn’t brutal by trail crew standards, it’s a gentle enough grade that day hikers do it in tennis shoes, but I only get to make that trip a handful of times before the season locks in behind me, so everything I carry up in June has to last through October. That’s not a hiking problem, that’s a packing problem, and packing problems are the one part of this job that overlaps clean with the one before it.

On trail crew you learn fast that weight has to buy something. A crosscut saw is heavy and buys you the ability to clear a downed lodgepole across the trail, so it earns its keep. A second pair of dry socks is heavy for what it is and buys you not getting trench foot on a wet week, so it earns its keep too. Everything else gets left at the trailhead, including things you’d genuinely enjoy having, because enjoyment isn’t the same category as earning its keep.

How does a person pack for a five month stretch where nothing gets swapped out once the season starts?? I apply the same math to what goes up the mountain, and it’s ruthless in a way that surprised me my first year doing it. A four hundred page book that might disappoint me is a bad trade, dead weight for the whole hike plus the whole season, sitting on the shelf reminding me I made a bad call every time I look at it. A two hundred page book I’m fairly sure I’ll want to reread is a good trade even though it’s shorter, because rereads are free once the weight’s already up there. Games are worse math because the box weighs more than the rulebook alone would, so a two player game with a small footprint and real replay value, something like a deck of cards worth of components, earns its spot over a box full of miniatures that’ll get played twice and then just sit there being heavy for no reason.

What I’ve noticed, doing this math for five seasons now, is that it’s made me a more honest reader and player than I probably was before. On trail crew you can’t fool yourself about whether a tool is worth its weight, the mountain settles the argument for you by the third day of carrying it uphill for nothing. Same thing happens with a book. If I packed something because I thought I should have read it, not because I actually wanted to, the tower has four months to make that distinction obvious, and it does, every single time, the unread ones sitting there on the shelf the whole season like a saw I never needed to bring.

So the list gets shorter every year, not longer, which isn’t what you’d expect from somebody who reads and plays as much as I do up here. I used to pack for the person I wanted to be that summer. Now I pack for the person who already knows what he actually reaches for at eight at night when the light’s going and there’s nothing else to do, and that person doesn’t need nearly as much as he thinks he does standing in his apartment in Missoula in May, looking at a shelf and trying to guess what four inches of headlamp battery a night is going to feel like by August.