What I Don't Carry Anymore

First June I did this, I carried up a French press, a second pair of boots in case the first pair blew out, six books because I didn’t trust myself to ration one, and a guitar, which I want on the record I only tried once. The pack weighed something I’m embarrassed to say out loud now, and by mile two of four I understood in my legs, not my head, that most of what was in it had been chosen at the outfitter by someone who’d never done this particular hike and was guessing.

The guitar came back down with me that October, strings gone slack from five months of temperature swings it wasn’t built to handle, and I never brought it again. Not because I don’t miss having it, some evenings I do, but because a guitar in a fourteen by fourteen room with thin walls and no soundproofing and nobody around to mind the noise sounds like a good idea and turns out to just be an object taking up shelf space that a game or a book would use better. The French press went the same way after two seasons, not because it didn’t work but because it was one more thing that could break on the trail and the coffee tastes about the same either way once you’re tired enough in the morning to not much care.

What I actually carry now is close to embarrassingly simple compared to that first pack. One pair of boots, broken in well before June so there’s no blister risk on the hike itself. Books rationed tight, because I know now the supply drop will bring more in August and running out by July isn’t the crisis it felt like in year one, it’s just a stretch where I reread something. A couple of small games that survive heat and cold and getting thrown around, weight under a pound each being the real filter now, not how good the game is on its own merits, though the good ones tend to also be the light ones, which I’ve come to think isn’t a coincidence. Good design and good portability solve a lot of the same problems.

The hike itself hasn’t changed in five years, same four miles, same six hundred feet of gain concentrated mostly in the last mile, same spot about three quarters of the way up where the trees open and you get the first look at the tower still a while off, small on its rock outcrop, which never stops being a strange thing to see after a winter of not seeing it. I know the trail well enough now that I could probably do it with my eyes closed for stretches, which sounds like a joke but isn’t really, I’ve caught myself hiking it on autopilot, thinking about something else entirely and looking up to find I’ve covered a quarter mile without registering any of it.

What surprises me most, five seasons in, isn’t what I’ve learned to leave behind. It’s how much lighter the whole enterprise gets once you stop packing for the season you’re afraid of having and start packing for the one you’ve actually had four times already. The first year you pack for every contingency. By year five you pack for the specific, boring, mostly uneventful summer that’s almost certainly what’s coming, and you’re usually right.