stg-sectionhikercom-buttons.kinsta.cloud Backpacking Gear Reviews and FAQs

Wilderness navigation requires planning routes across terrain that doesn’t have pre-defined trails or roads to follow. While following a route using a map and compass, GPS, map-to-terrain association or just dead reckoning is required, those tools and techniques don’t provide you with the skills to plan good cross-country routes. Part art and part experience, learning how to plan new routes that are efficient to …

A few years ago, I wrote a series of posts on how to lighten your backpack, that outlined the basic principles of lightweight ad ultralight backpacking: weighing your gear, cutting the weight of your big three, selecting gear that can serve multiple functions, and eliminating everything you really don’t need. Lighten Up your Backpack: Weighing your Gear Lighten Up Your …

You don’t need a tent, specifically, for backpacking but you do need some form of rain protection and/or insect protection in most climates when camping out along a trail. It can be a tent, hammock with a tarp, a waterproof bivy sack, a bug shelter, or some combination of these to provide the protection you need. You should also carry …

Peakbagging is the oldest and most elemental of all hiking pursuits. Best defined as an insatiable desire to climb a list of mountains, it’s certainly one of the toughest forms of hiking requiring physical fitness, mental toughness, and dogged persistence. Many peakbaggers hike year-round including winter, following hiking trails, driving down logging roads to remote trailheads, pulling sleds of gear …