They that are serious in ridiculous matters will be ridiculous in serious affairs.
PLUTARCH
“THERE WE WERE! Hadn’t seen a sign of other people for six days. The temperature that morning was 20 below and the wind was gusting to 90 mph, but we shouldered our 80-pound packs and . . .”
If anyone tried to feed you that story, you’d wisely be suspicious of half of what he said. Yet he’d be only slightly overplaying a game that most of us backwoods hikers play.
We’re normally an honest enough crowd. You meet few outright car thieves or embezzling accountants in the backcountry, and we don’t recall that backpacking was listed as a hobby of any of the Watergate or Iran-Contra conspirators. Still, there are certain subjects that a hiker simply can’t discuss without Twainsian exaggeration at the least. If fishermen are more renowned for their estimates of the one that got away, it’s only because we backpackers have not articulated our own stories adequately yet. But, God knows, some of us try.
For your guidance (and protection) we identify half a dozen favorite subjects for loquacious backpakers’ tall-tale telling.
This ploy has two versions. The first version consists of grossly overestimating your pack’s weight and thereby gaining points for superior strength and stamina. The figures usually given for this purpose range, for men, from 70 to 90 pounds; for women, 60 to 80 is the preferred range. More than 100 strains credibility and you lose points.
In the second version, instead of implying strength, you gain points by demonstrating your resourcefulness and toughness in surviving on practically nothing—which you indicate by underestimating your pack’s weight. For instance, you went out for six days in the wilds and the pack weighed less than 20 pounds.
We’ve seen many a relatively inexperienced backpacker come to ruin by playing the first version of this game in a crowd that turned out to have the experience and shrewdness to pull the second on him unexpectedly. Just when the poor duffer thinks his listeners are impressed with his tales of 80-pound packs lugged over continental divides, someone in the group remarks coolly that he used to carry weights like that, but now he’s got it down so that he can go five days on 13.5 pounds and have food left over. Others in the group then start in on how they cut handles off toothbrushes and remove the cardboard from inside the toilet paper, and pretty soon the air is dripping with scorn for the utter oafishness of anyone who’d carry 80 pounds, even were he headed for Outer Mongolia from Singapore.
The old-time hard men still can’t resist the lure of the 90-pound pack. Once when we were in the Carter Range of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, one of the hut boys of the Appalachian Mountain Club had just packed 135 pounds up to Carter Notch Hut. That figure was authentic: They had scales right there. An hour or so later, he started down the trail to return to AMC’s base camp at Pinkham Notch. Unbeknownst to him, one of us was sunning himself on top of a tall boulder next to the trail. As this young husky passed underneath alone, we heard him say quietly to himself, “How much did you take up to Carter today?” (Pause—then in casual tones:) “135 pounds.” (Pause—then with hushed awe:) “Wow!” Evidently we were the unsuspected audience for a rehearsal of a conversation to which our young friend looked forward with all the relish of a true backpacker.
Here is another ploy that can cut both ways: You’ll hear some braggarts tell you about covering 25 miles of rough mountain terrain with full packs. But the more sophisticated gamesmen have learned how to lay waste the opposition by describing what a formidable bushwhacking trip they struggled through: “All day we fought through dense growth, with only the compass to guide us, and in 10 hours of monumental effort we’d covered less than 2 miles.” The latter’s listeners are cowed by the implication that only superhuman strength and resolution could keep a person going through such incredibly tangled jungle.
Most of us hikers yearn for the wilderness to be wilder than it really is in this day and age. Part of the true pleasure of hiking is the illusion of getting into a country where few people are, or better yet, ever have been. We speak wistfully of “mountain solitude.”
Perhaps this is why some backpackers go in for the fantasy that, “We didn’t see a sign of other people for six days.” It’s still possible to go places where you can really escape all evidence of humans, present or past. But few really get there. More likely you’re bound to hear a plane overhead at some point, find a worn track that isn’t just deer or moose, or, worst of all, kick up a Vienna sausage can on the edge of a clearing that you thought was your aboriginal discovery.
Stand on a remote New England mountaintop and look out over miles of rugged, heavily forested ridges, and you can be tempted to speculate that much of it is country where no one has ever been. As you sit staring at those ridges, you slowly realize that many of them show faintly discernible patterns of horizontal lines. These are the tracings of old lumber roads switchbacking up the ridges from the days when loggers crisscrossed the entire area. Instead of your dream that no humans have ever set foot on those ridges comes the realization that 100 years ago they were crawling with logging teams.
So when someone tells you that they were out in country where no one had ever been before, control your envy. The nineteenth-century loggers, as well as hunters and trappers, combed over this grand country from east to west pretty thoroughly, and your pioneer friend was probably stalking the ghosts of several generations of outdoorsmen who never heard of Kelty packs or Mountain House freeze-dried food.
If you’ve ever been above the treeline when the wind was really hitting 60 mph, you turn a benevolently skeptical ear to the tales of crossing rugged terrain with heavy packs in 90-mph winds. We don’t know very many people who carry an anemometer with them. Those who do develop a conservatism in estimating wind speed that seems to elude the rest of us.
Once five of us were climbing on Maine’s Katahdin in winter. It was one of those wild days above treeline. When we climbed out of our snow gully onto that remarkably flat tableland plateau of Katahdin’s upper elevations, we were engulfed in clouds. Visibility was reduced to 50 feet at best, and there was no place to hide from the wind or cold. Before starting out on a compass course, we huddled together for a bit of lunch, numbed by the cold and buffeted by the wind, which seemed stronger than most of the party had experienced before. At this point one of our group produced an anemometer from his pack and invited our guesses on the wind speed. The other four of us guessed speeds ranging from 30 to 50 mph; no doubt, had there been no instrument around, the Monday morning office stories would have definitely fixed the speed at least at 50 mph. (Usually speed increases in memory from the already exaggerated estimates of the actual moment.) Then our iconoclastic friend gave us his reading: 18 mph.
Once, when we were coming down from New Hampshire’s Presidential Range, we met another party at the trailhead, who asked how it was above treeline. “Windy!” we said. “How fast?” they asked. Clearly we were being invited to spout a figure, but out of what whole cloth are such figures supposed to be concocted? We didn’t know, and we suspect that few people have any real ability to judge wind speed. Our refusal to give a dramatic figure, though, seemed to disappoint the other hikers: We weren’t playing the true backpackers’ game.
You might think that Doc Fahrenheit’s handy invention might keep us all honest when reporting the temperature extremes in which we’ve camped or hiked. But the resourceful tale teller has carefully sanded down the sharp edges of his memory so that he can leap gracefully from hard, observed reading to speculations about what it “probably” was—and thus come up with some astonishing tales of extreme cold or heat.
We’ve been winter camping in northern New England for three decades, yet we’ve seen the thermometer actually reach -20°F on nights that we’ve been camped out on only three or four occasions. Still, we’ve regularly heard novices who took up winter camping for a year or two during that period regale their friends with what it’s like to camp at -20°F above treeline. Well, maybe they saw the red line sink to -20°F, but we’re skeptical.
We’ve been told by our western friends that desert hikers become just as imaginative in exaggerating the high temperatures they’ve walked through. (“We had to walk 15 miles carrying 80-pound packs in 120-degree heat with no water.”)
This is a highly specialized branch of the art. The very fact that backpackers who know anything about birds are as rare as Kirtland’s warbl—oops, sorry, we mean they’re very rare—gives lots of leeway to those who have little more than a nodding acquaintance with a Peterson Field Guide.
If you hear some far-off chirp, you’ll rarely be caught off base if you say, “Hey, did you hear that? Black-throated green warbler.” If your companions ask you to point it out, the bird can generally be stuck with the blame for not repeating the call, if it ever issued it in the first place. Of course, you risk having some unsuspecting amateur Audubon turn up among your companions and challenge your identifications. If you’ve just confidently snapped, “Yellow-throated vireo” as a winged creature flitted momentarily in and out of view among some hemlocks, you might be aghast to have someone in the group venture an apparently better-informed view that it was in fact a robin. (Sometimes you can get out of this predicament by smilingly observing that the female immatures are not always readily distinguished.)
Variants of the bird species ploy may be explored in such areas as tree identification, ferns, rock types, and especially alpine flowers.
These are just a few of many areas in which the joys of the hiker’s memory may transcend the confines of mere experience. Hiking speed, angle of slope climbed, and wild food foraged are some other possibilities.
We do not offer these suggestions in any critical sense, nor as definitive. Backpackers are still developing the state of the art, and we have much to learn from our fishing and hunting cousins. You might want to work up your own subjects and refine your own tips for successful playing of the game. After all, this activity will provide interesting employment for your mind while you’re ticking off the miles on those 50-mile day hikes.