Water is an incredibly important part of long distance backpacking to make sure you stay hydrated and healthy. Unfortunately, water is heavy so minimizing the amount you carry is always helpful as long as you can access enough of it along the trail. To figure out how much to carry you need know; how much you drink, how easy it is for you to filter water, and how frequent water sources are.
How much water do you drink in a day of backpacking? Roslyn and I have figured out that we use 5 to 6 litres of water each per day if its about 20C out and we are doing moderate hiking. 6 litres of water weighs just over 13 lbs, which us about half of the 'safe' weight maximum of 30 lbs we try to stay at. If we are doing strenuous hiking or the temperature is higher we pretty quickly hit 9 to 10 litres of water each. 10 litres of water comes in at 22 lbs, which is just a back breaking amount to add on top of everything else if you are trying to cover 20 km.
I also want to point out that a large portion of the water is used in the morning when we wake up, and at night for supper and before bed. We use about 2 litres of water at camp per day, so on a moderate hiking day only 3 litres is used on trail.
Now that we know how much we need in a moderate day (5 litres), how easy is it for us to get that water filtered? Roslyn and I use the Sawyer Mini, which is a very simple and quick filtering system. We can filter about 3 litres of water in 10 to 15 minutes if we get to a water source. Other systems like gravity feed systems or tablets required more time or at least more care to make sure you don't run out of water before having more ready to go.
With our setup, we can filter quickly and easily so down time is not a large issue. If you are using a water purification method that takes longer though you might want to consider timing water filtration with larger breaks (lunch or another 30+ minutes break) in order to minimize unnecessary downtime. Unfortunately, filtering less often means carrying more between filtering periods.
The last piece of information you need to figure out is how frequent water sources are on the trail. Whatever source of navigation you are using should have water sources on it, and you can then figure out what the distances between all of them are. Roslyn and I try to make sure we have enough water to travel between 2 to 4 water sources with out refilling and then aim to refill at source number 2 or 3 depending on how they are looking and how much we are drinking. This means that we are likely to get to a source before running out even if our first planned stop is dry.
Now to bring it all together with an example. For a moderate day of hiking we each need 5 litres of water to cover about 20 km, 3 litres while hiking and 2 litres at camp. With these numbers we are drinking about 0.15 litres per km. If the water sources are spaced every 3 to 4 km then we can easily carry 2 litres of water each to get about 10 to 13 km with out needing to refill and have plenty of opportunities to do so before running out.
If its a hot day on strenuous terrain and we need 10 litres of water (2 litres at camp and 8 litre while hiking), for a 20 km day we are drinking about 0.4 litres per km. On 2 litres of water we can get about 5 km. If water sources are still every 3 to 4 km we need to carry at least 3 litres cover two water sources in case the first one is dry. To easily cover 10 to 13 km without worries like in the first example we would need a bit over 5 litres. That's a difference of about 7 lbs of water, and something we would like to avoid. In this situation, instead of taking enough to get 10 to 13 km we would only bring about 3 litres each so we can get to two water sources and then plan on filling up at every water source.
The second example shows how quickly you can go from 2 litres is okay and only needing to refill once or twice in a day, to 2 litres gets us to the next water source I hope its not dry. Making sure to plan out your water is one of the most important parts of a backpacking trip to make sure you don't injure yourself, especially in hot and strenuous conditions.
Tuesday, April 28, 2020
Wednesday, April 22, 2020
Pre-Season Preparations, Part 1
As the backpacking season fast approaches, Roslyn and I have identified some ways to improve our backpacking trips. We want to improve our distance, reduce injury and fatigue, and become more efficient in what we do around camp.
The first thing to do is get back into shape for the backpacking season. We have slowly been adding more winter activities to remain in shape, but hauling a backpack up and down hills for 10+ hours a day puts a lot of stress on your feet an knees. Proper conditioning is one of the things we have decided to focus on to help reduce injury and fatigue issues.
Our plan has 3 main parts to it, each helping build towards a goal of doing repeated 20 km days with minimal soreness at the end.
Part 1 - Frequent Use
Part one of our plan is to get frequent use out of our feet and knees. We have been doing this by heading out for about 30 to 60 minutes every day after work in the city. We have been making sure to keep the pace fairly high and to do about 2 to 4 km every day. Since pretty much all the walking in the city is on pavement/concrete this has been helping keep our bodies in a lightly used state.
Part 2 - A Weekly Push
Once per week we have been going out for a longer walk in the 8 to 12 km range.Our goal for these has been to keep a brisk 5 to 6 km per hour pace up the entire time. We've managed to get out for the last three weeks now early on a Sunday, which has been nice. Our plan is to keep these up and potentially push out to a 15 km in 3 to 3.5 hours by the end of the summer. Since this is without any weight and usually on fairly easy trail its a good work out and helps with some of the cardio side of things.
Part 3 - Sprints!
Now that the snow and ice are gone (for the most part) we are going to add intervals into three of our daily walking trips. To start we are going to do a 10 to 15 second sprint every two minutes. This will help get our cardio and heart rate up, but also help by putting more force onto our feet and joints during the sprint. The extra load will help with conditioning over time.
That's our current plan to get back into shape for the backpacking season. Our main concerns are avoiding any injuries on the way there, as repeated stress injuries are fairly common when hiking/backpacking with lots of weight for long periods of time. Slowly conditioning ourselves back into shape should both help reduce the chance of injury and help us go further.
The first thing to do is get back into shape for the backpacking season. We have slowly been adding more winter activities to remain in shape, but hauling a backpack up and down hills for 10+ hours a day puts a lot of stress on your feet an knees. Proper conditioning is one of the things we have decided to focus on to help reduce injury and fatigue issues.
Our plan has 3 main parts to it, each helping build towards a goal of doing repeated 20 km days with minimal soreness at the end.
Part 1 - Frequent Use
Part one of our plan is to get frequent use out of our feet and knees. We have been doing this by heading out for about 30 to 60 minutes every day after work in the city. We have been making sure to keep the pace fairly high and to do about 2 to 4 km every day. Since pretty much all the walking in the city is on pavement/concrete this has been helping keep our bodies in a lightly used state.
Part 2 - A Weekly Push
Once per week we have been going out for a longer walk in the 8 to 12 km range.Our goal for these has been to keep a brisk 5 to 6 km per hour pace up the entire time. We've managed to get out for the last three weeks now early on a Sunday, which has been nice. Our plan is to keep these up and potentially push out to a 15 km in 3 to 3.5 hours by the end of the summer. Since this is without any weight and usually on fairly easy trail its a good work out and helps with some of the cardio side of things.
Part 3 - Sprints!
Now that the snow and ice are gone (for the most part) we are going to add intervals into three of our daily walking trips. To start we are going to do a 10 to 15 second sprint every two minutes. This will help get our cardio and heart rate up, but also help by putting more force onto our feet and joints during the sprint. The extra load will help with conditioning over time.
That's our current plan to get back into shape for the backpacking season. Our main concerns are avoiding any injuries on the way there, as repeated stress injuries are fairly common when hiking/backpacking with lots of weight for long periods of time. Slowly conditioning ourselves back into shape should both help reduce the chance of injury and help us go further.
Tuesday, April 14, 2020
Simply Stuff - The Big Three
Every backpacker must bring a shelter, sleeping system, and backpack on a backpacking trip. These three items are commonly referred to as the 'Big Three', and they can make or break a hiking trip depending on how well they perform. The Big Three come in as the three most important items for comfort, weight, and cost as need to be chosen with all of that in mind.
While I will talk about the weight aspect in the Carry Your Weight series, here is what each of the Big Three need to accomplish to meet your goals when out backpacking, and a couple different methods of meeting those goals.
Shelter
Your shelter needs to keep you dry, out of the wind, and help keep you warm at night. Storing all of your gear is a nice bonus, but a lot of your stuff will be kept outside; food should be in an appropriate storage location, footwear/wet gear/trekking poles should remain outside, and you likely won't actually have much else.
There are a couple different ways to provide yourself with shelter on the trail. The most popular is a tent. Tent's allow for fairly easy setup anywhere and provide the largest amount of protection from the elements for yourself and your gear. Next are hammocks. Many people prefer hammocks over tents as they sleep better in them, though they are more limited since you need trees. Third are bivy sacks. Bivy sacks are essentially a coffin shaped tent that you can slide a sleeping bag into. The last two common shelter setups are tarps and cowboy camping. Tarping is just like it sounds, you just make a canopy from a tarp to sleep under, though the lack of a bottom means location is important to keep the water out. Cowboy camping is going without a shelter, simply sleeping in your sleeping bag under the stars.
There are a lot of trade offs between each of the above shelter systems. Roslyn and I have chosen to use a tent because we plan on going to a large variety of terrain and weather types, and a tent makes us feel most comfortable with our shelter setup. We are currently using the Marmot Tungsten UL 2P tent for backpacking trips, which is just over 3 lbs for two people.
Sleeping System
The sleeping systems goal is keep you comfortable while you sleep. Depending on conditions you might need different gear for different temperatures or different shelters. The basic sleeping system setup is a sleeping bag with a sleeping pad. Sleeping pads come in a couple different varieties, closed cell foam, self-inflating foam, or air inflated, each with it's own pros and cons. There are also a large variety of sleeping bags with down vs synthetic being the main choice to make. Down quilts are also a popular choice and are usually a bit lighter than sleeping bags.
Roslyn and I are currently using inflatable air pads with sleeping bags as our sleep system. the sleeping bags are usable down to around -5C, but it's not the most comfortable night ever.
Backpack
The backpacks goal is to keep all your stuff together and comfortably supported on your back while hiking.There are a lot of different ways backpacks do this. The main choices come down to internal vs external frame, roll down vs non-roll down top, uses a brain vs does not use a brain, size of the bag, the number of extra pockets and straps, and the material. I think that choosing a backpack is harder than choosing a shelter or sleeping system because of all the little details that can help or hinder your trip.
Right now Roslyn and I each have 3 backpacks for different types of trips. I have a small 18L pack for day hiking, a 30L pack for warm weather trips in the 3-4 days length, and a 55L backpack for trips that are either 5+ days long or where I need to bring extra clothing or rain gear. Roslyn has a 28L pack for day hikes, a 33L pack for 3-4 day warm weather trips, and a 65L pack for longer excursions. Both of us want to try out some backpacks in the 40L to 45L range as the 55/65L packs are a bit large for us at the moment and we would like to cut some weight.
I'll have some more posts up about each of these eventually, but if you have any specific questions about the Big Three let me know.
Wednesday, April 8, 2020
Carry Your Weight - Food, Glorious Food!
After your base weight, food, water, and fuel make up the rest of the weight in your pack. Food weight is likely to be the heaviest of the three, at least for the first day or two out. Properly managing food weight will help the most out of the three consumables to keep your top pack weight to a minimum. However, you need to make sure you eat enough, otherwise you will fatigue too quickly and the day will be a lot harder.
The general rule of thumb used for food is 2 lbs of food per day. This includes all meals and snacks for the day. The trick is to pack as many calories as possible into that two pounds as you can, while still eating enough vitamins and minerals to remain healthy. And enough calories to fuel your body.
First up, here's two things to avoid while preparing meals for a backpacking trip.
1 - Avoid food with a lot of water in it. Water is dense at 2.2 lbs per litre, and has no nutritional value and zero calories. Fresh fruits, vegetables, and canned goods are heavy for what you get and should be avoided as the main part of your food supply. Roslyn and I bring some fresh food on day 1 when it will keep but after that everything should be as low water content as possible to keep weight down.
Leaving water out means using dehydrated or dried foods, and adding water to them on trail. This method works best if you can camp near water sources so that you don't need to carry water with you to make your meals at camp. If you do need to dry camp you can plan to have a supper that doesn't require water that night to minimize your water weight.
2 - Avoid eating just sugars. While candy, chocolate bars, and sweets can be low in water weight and high in calories they lack other nutrients and sugar is technically a toxin. Your body does not want to consume an all sugar diet, and even though you're getting a lot of calories you will not feel good or energetic. Sugar also acts as a minor diuretic due to your body trying to flush it out of your system, this means you will have to consume more water than normal to remain hydrated. Take some candy as a snack or morale booster, but don't make it your main source of food.
With those out of the way, here's some examples of what Roslyn and I typically bring for food.
Breakfasts
In a lot of cases we don’t bring breakfast. We find it slows us down and I don't lie eating in the morning. When we do bring breakfasts, they are usually 2 instant oatmeal packets each, or about 1/2 cup of dry oatmeal. We have also brought breakfast bars, and usually 2 of those is enough for breakfast.
Both oatmeal and breakfast bars tend to have a good blend of calories, vitamins, and sugar. They also don't have much water. The oatmeal will need to be either cooked with water or cold soaked, and most backpacking bars are pretty dry.
Lunch
Lunch on day 1 is almost always some cheese and 1/3 of a garlic sausage each (2/3 of a sausage is used). Lunch on day 2 and 3 is either beef jerky and cheese, maybe a bagel and cheese, or some bars and cheese. Cheese keeps well on trail for 2 to 3 days depending on temperature. The garlic sausage gets completely eaten day 1 between lunch and supper each trip because its heavy, but it's one of our luxury items.
Supper
For supper we either eat instant ramen noodles, instant mashed potatoes, or side kicks packages with dehydrated veggies flakes. On day 1 we treat ourselves and dice up the remaining 1/3 of the garlic sausage and throw it in too. We either eat 1 ramen or side kicks each or split 1 package of instant mashed potatoes. All of these meals need water added to them and are okay cold soaked if you don't want to bring any fuel (or if you forget it!).
Snacks
Since we generally skip breakfast and our meals are on the ‘light’ side, we usually bring at least 3 snacks per day each. We will have 2 cliff bars, 15 to 20 pieces of gummy candy, and some trail mix/nut mix/muchies mix each per day. We eat a cliff bar about an hour into the day, and then snack of the candy and trail mix as we go. If we are really hungry we eat the extra cliff bar at the end of the day.
The general rule of thumb used for food is 2 lbs of food per day. This includes all meals and snacks for the day. The trick is to pack as many calories as possible into that two pounds as you can, while still eating enough vitamins and minerals to remain healthy. And enough calories to fuel your body.
First up, here's two things to avoid while preparing meals for a backpacking trip.
1 - Avoid food with a lot of water in it. Water is dense at 2.2 lbs per litre, and has no nutritional value and zero calories. Fresh fruits, vegetables, and canned goods are heavy for what you get and should be avoided as the main part of your food supply. Roslyn and I bring some fresh food on day 1 when it will keep but after that everything should be as low water content as possible to keep weight down.
Leaving water out means using dehydrated or dried foods, and adding water to them on trail. This method works best if you can camp near water sources so that you don't need to carry water with you to make your meals at camp. If you do need to dry camp you can plan to have a supper that doesn't require water that night to minimize your water weight.
2 - Avoid eating just sugars. While candy, chocolate bars, and sweets can be low in water weight and high in calories they lack other nutrients and sugar is technically a toxin. Your body does not want to consume an all sugar diet, and even though you're getting a lot of calories you will not feel good or energetic. Sugar also acts as a minor diuretic due to your body trying to flush it out of your system, this means you will have to consume more water than normal to remain hydrated. Take some candy as a snack or morale booster, but don't make it your main source of food.
With those out of the way, here's some examples of what Roslyn and I typically bring for food.
Breakfasts
In a lot of cases we don’t bring breakfast. We find it slows us down and I don't lie eating in the morning. When we do bring breakfasts, they are usually 2 instant oatmeal packets each, or about 1/2 cup of dry oatmeal. We have also brought breakfast bars, and usually 2 of those is enough for breakfast.
Both oatmeal and breakfast bars tend to have a good blend of calories, vitamins, and sugar. They also don't have much water. The oatmeal will need to be either cooked with water or cold soaked, and most backpacking bars are pretty dry.
Lunch
Lunch on day 1 is almost always some cheese and 1/3 of a garlic sausage each (2/3 of a sausage is used). Lunch on day 2 and 3 is either beef jerky and cheese, maybe a bagel and cheese, or some bars and cheese. Cheese keeps well on trail for 2 to 3 days depending on temperature. The garlic sausage gets completely eaten day 1 between lunch and supper each trip because its heavy, but it's one of our luxury items.
Supper
For supper we either eat instant ramen noodles, instant mashed potatoes, or side kicks packages with dehydrated veggies flakes. On day 1 we treat ourselves and dice up the remaining 1/3 of the garlic sausage and throw it in too. We either eat 1 ramen or side kicks each or split 1 package of instant mashed potatoes. All of these meals need water added to them and are okay cold soaked if you don't want to bring any fuel (or if you forget it!).
Snacks
Since we generally skip breakfast and our meals are on the ‘light’ side, we usually bring at least 3 snacks per day each. We will have 2 cliff bars, 15 to 20 pieces of gummy candy, and some trail mix/nut mix/muchies mix each per day. We eat a cliff bar about an hour into the day, and then snack of the candy and trail mix as we go. If we are really hungry we eat the extra cliff bar at the end of the day.
Flavoring
To help make the food more interesting, we also bring some ways to flavour them. Spices packets and flavoured tuna packets work wonders on making 20 cent ramen packets taste amazing, and they are usually either inexpensive or easy to make yourself. We also try to bring either Mio or some water crystals to flavour our water occasionally as well as tea and hot chocolate powder for a nice evening drink.
So that's a break down of how plan our meals, with an eye on keeping weight down. We find that the 2 lbs of food per day rule of thumb is a pretty accurate metric to go by as long as you are taking low water weight foods. Unfortunately, this means that a 4 day trip adds 8 lbs of weight to your pack, putting Roslyn and I up to around 26 lbs, 18 lb base weight and 8 lbs of food. Once water and fuel are added in we start getting pretty close to the 30 lb limit we want to stay under.
To help make the food more interesting, we also bring some ways to flavour them. Spices packets and flavoured tuna packets work wonders on making 20 cent ramen packets taste amazing, and they are usually either inexpensive or easy to make yourself. We also try to bring either Mio or some water crystals to flavour our water occasionally as well as tea and hot chocolate powder for a nice evening drink.
So that's a break down of how plan our meals, with an eye on keeping weight down. We find that the 2 lbs of food per day rule of thumb is a pretty accurate metric to go by as long as you are taking low water weight foods. Unfortunately, this means that a 4 day trip adds 8 lbs of weight to your pack, putting Roslyn and I up to around 26 lbs, 18 lb base weight and 8 lbs of food. Once water and fuel are added in we start getting pretty close to the 30 lb limit we want to stay under.
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