By Ruth
Tonight is our last night in the lap of Aucklander luxury before we head up north. Over the past few days we’ve been stocking up on food and the last few supplies we needed, and we are now packing up our bags for the start of the trail. I thought this would be a good opportunity to give you a bit of insight into what is going to be in our packs when we start walking on Monday.
Gear
Above is a picture of all the gear we packed in Vancouver. You can see we each have a small pile of clothes, sleeping bag, mat, poles, some eating/drinking utensils, electronics (we each are bringing a phone and an e-reader), toiletries, travel documents, as well as a tent to share. It looks like a lot but packs up quite compactly – here we are with everything at YVR departures:
Food
The first section of trail is actually one of the longer ones without an easy re-supply. We are packing what we expect to be food for 4 nights, but since we don’t really know how hungry we’ll be or how satisfying some of our food choices will be, this first leg might end up being a bit of an experiment to help us calibrate how much food we really should be bringing per night on the trail. Of course since we’re carrying everything on our backs, we don’t want to bring too much. But, for the same reason, we don’t want to bring too little and run out of energy to carry the packs! A real optimization problem… good thing we are both engineers.
Here is what we are bringing:
The last couple of pieces of gear we picked up here in Auckland were a gas canister – because you can’t bring those on the plane – and pack liners. Pack liners seem to be one of those hiking culture differences between NZ and Canada. In our experience, the way people tend to prepare for wet conditions back home is to get a waterproof cover for their pack, and maybe a smaller waterproof stuff sack for their sleeping bag and any other vital things, and that usually works fairly well to keep everything dry-ish. Over here, the thing to do is get a pack liner: essentially a big, sturdy garbage bag that goes inside your pack, and everything else goes inside that. You roll down the top, and then you could be chest deep in a river before your things start getting wet. We wanted to do things the proper Kiwi way, but the outdoor stores in Canada don’t even sell pack liners! Luckily the store we went to a couple days ago had several options and we easily managed to get them here.
Now we are truly ready to tramp!
(Disclaimer: above is not the recommended way to use a pack liner.)