YOU DON’T NEED NEW GEAR. YOU NEED MORE MILES.
Gear Acquisition Syndrome has a cost that doesn’t show up on your gear spreadsheet.
There is a remarkably convenient way to get better at backpacking without going backpacking.
Buy something.
A lighter backpack.
A new tent.
A warmer quilt.
A titanium stove.
A different water filter.
A new rain jacket that’s 2.7 ounces lighter than the perfectly functional rain jacket hanging in your closet.
You can spend hours researching it. You can compare specifications. You can watch reviews. You can read Reddit threads. You can update your LighterPack.
Then the package arrives.
You weigh it.
Twenty-three ounces became seventeen.
Success.
You have measurably improved your backpacking setup without taking a single step down a trail.
There’s even a name for the phenomenon.
Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
And backpacking may be one of the easiest places to catch it.
SHOPPING FEELS LIKE PROGRESS
The problem isn’t that backpacking gear doesn’t matter.
It absolutely does.
I’ve replaced equipment in the middle of thru-hikes because I chose the wrong gear. I’ve carried things that were uncomfortable, impractical or simply didn’t work for the way I actually hiked.
But there is an important difference between replacing gear because experience exposed a problem and replacing gear because the internet convinced you there was a problem.
The first requires hiking.
The second requires a credit card.
And the second is much easier.
If you want to become better at managing water, you need experience.
If you want to learn how much food you actually eat between resupplies, you need experience.
If you want to understand what clothing you need at 35 degrees after hiking through rain all day, you need experience.
If you want to learn what kind of shelter you actually enjoy living in for months, you need experience.
Those lessons are messy.
Buying something is clean.
Your backpack weighs 32 ounces.
Another backpack weighs 25.
Seven ounces lighter.
There it is.
A number proving that you’re now better equipped for backpacking.
Whether you’re actually a better backpacker is a completely different question.
THE SPREADSHEET DOESN’T KNOW HOW WELL YOU HIKE
This is part of what makes gear optimization so seductive.
Spreadsheets don’t require any backpacking experience.
They just require numbers.
Weight.
Price.
R-value.
Packed size.
Denier.
Fill weight.
Put two products next to each other and suddenly one can appear objectively better than the other.
A 25-ounce backpack is lighter than a 32-ounce backpack.
That’s true.
A 16-ounce shelter is lighter than a 24-ounce shelter.
Also true.
The problem comes when we quietly turn those specifications into performance measurements.
They’re not.
They’re numbers describing equipment.
The spreadsheet knows that one backpack weighs seven ounces less.
It doesn’t know which backpack lets you comfortably hike for two more hours.
It knows one shelter weighs eight ounces less.
It doesn’t know which shelter you’ll actually sleep well in after hiking 25 miles.
It knows your sleeping pad’s R-value.
It doesn’t know whether you toss and turn on it all night.
It knows exactly how many ounces are sitting on your back.
It doesn’t know how efficiently you move through the woods.
That’s the problem with optimizing backpacking on a spreadsheet.
The spreadsheet knows what your gear weighs. It doesn’t know how well you hike.
And because the numbers are so easy to compare, we can start treating them like experience.
They’re not.
A spreadsheet can tell you what changed.
Miles tell you whether the change actually mattered.
I BOUGHT THE COOL GEAR TOO
I’ve fallen into this myself.
I showed up to the Pacific Crest Trail having already thru-hiked the Appalachian Trail and put hundreds of additional miles on my feet that same year.
I wasn’t exactly new to backpacking.
And I still showed up with an aggressively weight-optimized setup.
My backpack was one of the trendy ultralight packs everybody wanted at the time. It was light. It looked great on a gear list.
Then I loaded it with a long food carry.
It was uncomfortable.
My shelter was a shaped tarp with a bivy. Again, light. Efficient. Very cool on paper.
Then there were bugs.
Because I couldn’t sit comfortably protected from them, I sometimes ate lying down inside my bivy.
When the weather was bad, I had very little comfortable living space.
This was equipment optimized exceptionally well for one metric:
weight.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t living on a spreadsheet.
I was living outside.
And outside gave me considerably better data.
So while I was still in the California desert, I replaced both the backpack and the shelter. I moved into a two-person non-freestanding tent and switched packs.
My base weight went up.
My life got better.
More importantly, my hiking didn’t suddenly get worse because the number at the bottom of my gear list got bigger.
That experience changed the way I thought about gear.
And things only got worse from an ultralight purity standpoint from there.
I eventually added dedicated town clothing.
I carried podcasting equipment.
I picked up a Tenkara fly rod and carried it for roughly half of the Pacific Crest Trail.
Not because I needed it.
Because fishing was fun.
On the Appalachian Trail, I somehow finished in Maine carrying six pairs of socks.
Six.
If you had shown my finishing gear lists to the version of me obsessing over equipment before those hikes, he might have had some questions.
But that’s part of what thousands of miles taught me.
The goal was never to own the best backpacking equipment.
The goal was to go backpacking.
GEAR HAS A WEIGHT WE DON’T MEASURE
There’s another problem with Gear Acquisition Syndrome that rarely gets included in discussions about weight.
Gear costs money.
Money usually requires work.
Work requires time.
And time is the thing most of us claim prevents us from hiking.
Think about that for a second.
Someone owns a perfectly functional tent.
A new tent comes out that’s eight ounces lighter.
It costs $600.
So they buy it.
Their gear spreadsheet immediately shows the improvement.
Minus eight ounces.
But another measurement is missing.
How many hours did they have to work to earn that $600?
Ten?
Twenty?
Thirty?
More?
Those hours don’t appear on LighterPack.
Neither does the commute.
Neither does the overtime shift.
Neither does the weekend spent working instead of going somewhere.
We obsess over removing ounces from our backpacks while adding hours to our work lives to pay for the privilege.
At some point, that becomes absurd.
The lightest backpack in the world isn’t particularly useful if you’re at work instead of carrying it.
WHAT DID THOSE SEVEN OUNCES ACTUALLY COST?
This doesn’t mean expensive gear is bad.
Sometimes expensive equipment dramatically improves an experience. Sometimes lighter equipment really does matter. Sometimes a replacement solves an actual problem.
But the calculation shouldn’t stop at grams.
Imagine replacing a perfectly good 24-ounce piece of equipment with a 17-ounce version for $400.
You saved seven ounces.
Great.
Now ask another question:
How many hours of your life did those seven ounces cost?
And then:
What else could you have done with those hours?
Maybe nothing. Maybe you were going to work them anyway.
But maybe the answer is a weekend backpacking trip.
Maybe it’s gas to drive to the trailhead.
Maybe it’s a plane ticket to hike somewhere you’ve never been.
Maybe it’s unpaid leave.
Maybe it’s simply having enough money saved that taking a week off doesn’t feel irresponsible.
The backpacking industry gives us endless ways to optimize what we’re carrying.
I’m not sure we spend nearly enough time optimizing how often we get to carry it.
THE INTERNET CAN ALWAYS FIND SOMETHING WRONG WITH YOUR GEAR
This is part of what makes Gear Acquisition Syndrome so difficult to escape.
There will always be something better.
Your tent weighs 30 ounces.
Someone’s weighs 24.
Your backpack weighs 28.
Someone’s weighs 19.
Your stove boils water in four minutes.
Someone’s does it in three.
Your sleeping pad has a perfectly acceptable warmth-to-weight ratio, but this year’s version weighs 1.8 ounces less.
There is no finish line.
You can build the perfect gear list today and discover a dozen ways to improve it tomorrow.
And if you’re consuming enough gear content, eventually perfectly functional equipment starts looking obsolete.
That’s a strange thing about optimization.
Once you start looking for problems, you can always find one.
A six-ounce difference starts feeling enormous because you’ve spent three evenings reading about six ounces.
Then you go backpacking and carry an extra liter of water.
That’s 2.2 pounds.
Or you pack two extra days of food.
Or you bring something you never use because you haven’t yet developed the experience to know you don’t need it.
We can spend hundreds or thousands of dollars shaving ounces from permanent equipment while paying remarkably little attention to the pounds controlled by judgment.
And judgment doesn’t come from comparing specifications.
It comes from screwing things up.
Carrying too much water.
Running out of water.
Packing too much food.
Running out of food.
Being cold.
Being too hot.
Discovering the thing you thought you needed hasn’t left the bottom of your pack in 300 miles.
Those aren’t failures of optimization.
They’re how you actually learn to backpack.
EXPERIENCE IS THE CHEAPEST ULTRALIGHT EQUIPMENT
The more you backpack, the more interesting this becomes.
You learn how much water you actually drink.
You learn how much food you actually eat.
You learn which pieces of clothing never leave your pack.
You learn which fears were justified and which ones weren’t.
You learn what you personally need to be comfortable.
You learn when a weather forecast actually matters.
You learn what you can leave home.
And occasionally you learn that the thing you thought was unnecessary is worth carrying.
Like a fly rod.
Experience doesn’t always make your backpack lighter.
Sometimes it gives you permission to make it heavier.
That’s an important distinction.
The objective isn’t necessarily to carry the least possible amount.
It’s to understand why you’re carrying what you’re carrying.
A beginner may carry an unnecessary pound because they don’t know any better.
An experienced backpacker may carry an unnecessary pound because that pound makes the trip considerably more enjoyable.
Those aren’t the same thing.
And no spreadsheet can distinguish between them.
It just sees the pound.
USE YOUR GEAR UNTIL IT TELLS YOU WHAT’S WRONG
There is an incredibly simple treatment for Gear Acquisition Syndrome.
Go hiking.
Take the gear you already own.
Use it.
If your backpack hurts, now you have useful information.
If you’re freezing every night, now you have useful information.
If your shelter drives you insane, now you have useful information.
If something remains buried in the bottom of your backpack for five consecutive trips, now you have useful information.
If you discover that an extra eight ounces lets you sleep better, hike longer or enjoy the trip more, that’s useful information too.
Let experience identify the problem before you spend money solving it.
That’s almost exactly what happened to me on the PCT.
I arrived with equipment that looked fantastic according to the metrics I had optimized.
Then the trail provided better data.
The backpack wasn’t comfortable for the way I needed to carry.
The shelter wasn’t comfortable for the way I wanted to live.
So I changed them.
Not because a reviewer told me something lighter had been released.
Because actual miles told me something wasn’t working.
That’s a very different purchasing decision.
And that’s the kind of information a spreadsheet can never give you before you leave home.
BUYING BACKPACKING GEAR IS NOT BACKPACKING
There’s nothing wrong with liking gear.
Gear is fun.
New fabrics are interesting. Shelter design is interesting. Pack construction is interesting. Watching the industry experiment with lighter, stronger and more functional equipment is genuinely interesting.
And sometimes buying a new piece of gear gets us excited enough to plan another trip.
That’s worth something too.
The problem begins when acquiring backpacking equipment starts replacing backpacking.
Because there’s an uncomfortable economic loop hiding underneath Gear Acquisition Syndrome:
Buy gear.
Need money.
Work more.
Have less time.
Hike less.
Spend your non-hiking time researching gear.
Buy more gear.
At some point, the hobby quietly changes.
You’re no longer primarily a backpacker.
You’re a backpacking-equipment consumer.
And those aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Maybe before buying the next upgrade, there’s one more specification worth checking.
Not ounces.
Not grams.
Not denier.
Not R-value.
Not packed volume.
Hours.
How many hours of your life does this cost?
Then ask whether you’d rather own the upgrade or spend some of those hours walking.
Because the spreadsheet already has plenty of data.
What it doesn’t have is the only data you can collect by actually going backpacking.
Miles.
Miles tell you whether the pack works.
Miles tell you whether the shelter works.
Miles tell you what you actually need.
Miles tell you what you don’t.
Miles might make your pack lighter.
They might make it heavier.
But they’ll make the decisions yours.
Because after thousands of miles and plenty of questionable gear decisions, one thing has become increasingly clear to me:
You probably don’t need more gear.
You probably need more miles.
