Backpacking weight is a big deal to me. When you’re like a hundred pounds, every pound is a whole percentage of your body weight. Every ounce counts. If I’m going to lug around an enormous camera and tripod, I need to shave off ounces everywhere else. For a tiny backpacking stove, the Snow Peak Litemax Stove is perfect.
Puffies have been my friend lately. With ambitious sufferfest mountain days, I often find myself hitting the trail early in the morning and slowly trudging out late at night when the sun is long gone. For days like these, I need insulation that moves with me but also doesn’t take up much space. The Adidas Outdoor Flyloft Jacket fits that bill.
When packing for the #UintasHike16, I wanted to shave as much weight off as possible. More weight and stuff means more of a chance I’d need to check a bag. And I hate checking bags because it’s so inefficient. I want to be on and off a plane, lickety split. I explored a few options to not bring a true water filter… LifeStraw Go, Vapur MicroFilter, and eventually settled on the Platypus Hydration Meta Bottle with filter.
It was the last day of our little trek. After a night of little sleep and lots of Kovas’ snoring, we all woke up at the buttcrack of dawn to pack up. I was psyched. It was crappy diner food time. Day one had been an ordeal. Day two was less so. Day three was our shortest day. Nothing could go wrong on this day where we were retracing our steps from Wilder Lake to the Highline Trailhead, right?
Wrong.
After a slightly disastrous yesterday in the Uintas, the whole hiking crew decided to alter trip plans once again. We were going to start the hike out and camp at a lake off a side trail. It was three miles from our current location at Four Lakes Basin to the destination, Wilder Lake. What could go wrong?