Shedding skins
Kim Stanley Robinson
Unreliable narrator
Backpacking gear that in the 1970s weighed 50 pounds now weighs eight – and works better. Could our cities follow the ultralite example, asks Kim Stanley Robinson
B ack in the 1970s, when I like many other hippies began to backpack in the Sierra Nevada of California (the greatest backpacking mountains on Earth, but that’s a topic for a different essay), backpacks often weighed fifty pounds, and when I took mine off at the end of a day’s walk and flexed my shoulders, it sometimes felt like I was going to float off into the sky.
So all along there were people thinking things could be different – in a word, lighter. And as the years have passed, my aging cohort has gotten too brittle to carry the old weights happily, while at the same time younger hikers have been attempting continent-crossing feats that have transformed backpacking from a hippie ramble into a postmodern extreme sport. These long-distance hikers often walk more than a marathon every day for months on end, and for them every ounce matters. So a new design ethos has sprung into being to serve this need. The important thing to note here is that it came about as a result of a shift in people’s desires and in their thinking about what matters, not from a change in materials, or from some kind of inherent technological progress operating on its own.
The raw materials have gotten a little stronger and lighter, but not much; they are still mostly nylon and down and various light metals. And really there’s no such thing as inherent technological progress. It’s our philosophies that change, and then we act on them. This is what makes the ultralite movement suggestive when we go on to think about the rest of our lives. Because we always carry our houses, one way or another.
So long, suburbia
For a long time, the heaviness of the gear seemed to make sense. After all, the backpack did hold everything you needed to live in the wilderness: your house, clothing, food and kitchen. Really the amazing thing was that it could be done at all. This amazement was one version of the technological sublime, and part of the pleasure.
And it was all the result of a category error: the problem of wilderness camping solved with a 1950s engineering approach which tried to make sure the camp would be as strong, dry and comfortable as life back home. It was the camp conceived as a mobile suburbia.
Tents best illustrate this vision. They had a roof, walls, a floor, and then a second roof, in the form of a rainfly strung over the tent proper. Strong tent poles and many lines and stakes held it all up. As it was your house, of course you had to be able to sit up in it, and really standing in it would be better. Bigger was better. The result was an eight-pound tent.
Now as it turned out, on a rainy night you were still going to get a little wet in this house of a tent, because nylon seams always leak a little; thus the doubled roof. It also turns out that when you are inside a waterproof nylon bag, with the seams sealed as well as they can be, you coat the inside with moisture every time you exhale. So inside these tents, some water came in through the seams, some by way of your breathing, and no matter how elaborate the tent was, you still got wet. Once a friend and I were pinned down by one of the multi-day Sierra summer storms called pineapple expresses, later understood to be an El Niño phenomenon, and as the rain and wind persisted, day after day, the interior of my tent began to fill with water like a nylon bathtub. I found there was a low peninsula under my floor on which I could arrange my ground pad and sleeping bag. My companion took advantage of a break in the downpour to come over and say hi. He looked in at my tent door and said, “Wow, your tent is really dry!” His floor didn’t have any peninsulas.
Why carry the whole tent when a roof is all you need?
More typically the summer Sierra is quite dry, and on starry nights in the mountains, you don’t actually want a suburban house. It’s fun to sleep out under the stars, it’s one of the reasons for going out in the first place. Days can go by when your tent never even leaves its stuff sack.
Of course when a thunderstorm strikes, or a rainy night arrives, then you really do need shelter. But what you really need is the roof, and one nylon sheet is about as dry as two, especially if you aren’t inside a nylon bag underneath it, capturing whatever moisture gets through. An awful truth bloomed in the mind of many a wet backpacker: only the rainfly was useful. Everything else was, in effect, an elaborate suspension system for that one crucial element. But you could suspend the rainfly from trees, and if there were no trees, you could drape it over the walking poles that were helping you so much as you hiked: turns out, they make great tent poles too. If it was windy, you could stake the fly right down to the ground, and be in something very like your original tent, except it had fewer places to leak, was more breathable, and had a much more lovely floor.
This last point may sound odd, but in fact the best ground to set a tent on is a level bed of decomposed granite, a mix of sand and gravel in which the first little rock-loving plants make a scattered appearance: grasses, buckwheats, saxifrage and so on. These combine to make the classic fell-field ground cover, tough and unobtrusively beautiful; it’s said that Persian carpets were patterned to resemble them. To have ground like that under your bed rather than a sheet of damp nylon is a joy.
Having only a roof over you can save you from other problems, too. Once I was sitting in my old-style tent in a snowstorm, cooking spaghetti on a gas stove, when the stove’s canister ran out of fuel. Just as it occurred to me that I was changing canisters by candlelight, the tent exploded. I shrieked and leaped back like a grasshopper, pulling the tent out of its stakes and onto me. It took me a long time to untangle myself and get everything re-established, and I felt very lucky to have lost only my eyebrows, the hair on my forearms and my tent’s mosquito netting to the brief heat of the explosion. But the spaghetti had dumped all over the floor. I spent the rest of the night dreaming I was trapped in an Italian restaurant. If my tent had not had a floor, things might not have gone so bad.
As the years of post-war backpacking passed, experiences like these accumulated. People began to take along only the rainfly from their tent, and an item previously weighing about eight pounds, and bulking hugely in even the largest backpack, suddenly weighed a pound or less, and filled a space the size of a water bottle.
Ultralite was born.
Toward the technological sublime
Similar discoveries were made for every piece of gear. When you sleep in a down sleeping bag, for instance, the down underneath you gets crushed flat and is useless as insulation or padding – so should a down sleeping bag have down on its bottom side? Wouldn’t it be just as warm at about half the weight, if its bottom half were merely a sheet of nylon? Turns out it would be.
In the evenings you wore a down jacket, at night you lay in a down bag; both were made sufficient for those purposes. But what if you wore your down jacket to bed? What if you draped your down bag over your shoulders on cold evenings like a cape? Then they would be parts of each other, and neither would have to be as heavy. In the old days a Sierra down jacket weighed two pounds, a down bag three; now a down vest is half a pound, a down bag a pound, and people are just as warm as before. Now my friends and I lie around our twilight camps like pashas in silks, radiating our body heat into outrageously fine goose down. At temperatures near freezing we are toasty as can be.
Another big item completely rethought was the backpack itself. In the vain hope of making them comfortable under ever-increasing loads, conventional backpacks had been bolstered with foam padding, internal or external frames, multiple pockets, zippers, and straps to adjust every possible dimension; and they got bigger every year, to hold all the other stuff. All that exacerbated the very problem people were trying to solve, until ultimately an empty backpack often weighed several pounds. And yet when things are on your back, lightness itself is the only real comfort. A bag slung over your shoulder on a rope is comfortable if it weighs only a few pounds. So a lighter backpack was clearly called for.
Here again, design was key. Some ultralite-gear pioneers used the lightest nylons to make backpacks that were simply bags with shoulder straps and waist belts. The results were so delicate, they had to be treated like eggs or they would tear, and their makers have since moved back to stronger and heavier nylons. I myself like to buy gear that has been taken one step too far, and when a half-pound backpack I liked was discontinued, I ordered three more. They came to me by mail in A4-sized envelopes, and I have used them ever since, very carefully. They make me laugh.
Now, with every piece of backpacking gear reconsidered and redesigned, a frequently stated goal is to get your total pack weight down to ten per cent of your body weight, at which point you don’t really notice you are carrying anything. Now that’s the technological sublime!
One of my favourite smaller innovations concerns the stove, or rather the lack of stove. Of course very light stoves exist now, and on snow trips it’s a joy to have their blazing flames, as hot as an arc welder’s torch. But the stove and gas and canisters together do add a dense chunk to a pack, and some years ago there appeared for sale little white cubes, reeking of weird chemicals and military research. Each cube boils one cup of water, and by using them you can dispense with both stove and fuel canister, and carry only the naked fuel itself. Constructing a little rock stove is a childlike pleasure, and watching the eerily energetic flame burn is like seeing what life would be like on a more oxygenated planet. A titanium pot weighs only a couple of ounces, and a plastic spoon you can barely weigh; and that is now my entire kitchen kit, except for a plastic cup for my scotch, also unweighably light. So my kitchen weighs three ounces, with about an ounce per day of naked stove fuel burning in a rock stove I build every night. It’s absurdly satisfying.
Air mattresses are another military tech, first widely used by the armies of the second world war. They were introduced into backpacking in the post-war period, but they turned out to be notoriously cold. The ground always beats your body in the convective battle over the temperature of the air in the mattress. Some of the coldest nights of my life have been spent on air mattresses. Once, while car-camping with one, my wife and I had to sleep curled on our pillows to avoid being frozen from below. People are still experimenting here, and right now these are the items seeing the most innovation. They need to be made of puncture-proof material, and they need something to keep them warm: a little down inside, or foam, or silver reflective paint. When a groundpad comes along that is warm and strong and light, then the last piece of the puzzle will be in place: every major piece of equipment will weigh a pound or less, minor items will weigh only ounces, and there will be dual use of many items. Already the same kit that in the 1970s weighed fifty pounds now weighs around eight, and yet functions better. With packs at ten per cent of your body weight, even with a week’s worth of food in them, any further progress is just fine-tuning.
These lighter weights allow you to do things you otherwise couldn’t. Though we are not as strong as when we were young, we now range farther in the Sierra than ever, and over rougher terrain. We explore the many glacial basins in the Sierra that have no trails, rambling across their granite and meadow expanses, then scrambling up and over the steep ridges that separate them. Sometimes we stray from slopes rated class 2 (difficult) to class 3 (dangerous), and then the absence of big loads on our backs makes it much easier to proceed, wide-eyed, meticulous, on point with every step. In those moments we are like kids on a jungle gym, perched high in the sun with an airplane view in all directions, looking out over range after range of peaks. Our gear is completely forgotten, and we are free to focus on the world itself.
The art of treading lightly
What does this mean for the many people who don’t backpack? Maybe it can be a microcosm for thinking about design and technology more generally.
Unsurprisingly, you can’t find ultralite gear in backpacking stores. The stores can’t carry it or they wouldn’t sell anything else, and profits would plummet. In the big brick-and-mortar outdoor stores of the US, the backpacking equipment is still supersized. The down gear would roast you in Antarctica, the backpacks could hold a hundred pounds and you wouldn’t feel it (in the store), the tents will accommodate dinner parties and withstand hurricanes. Bigger is better! To find ultralite gear, you have to go online. On the internet many little companies can specialise, be niche companies for niche audiences. They may not want to be small, but they can afford to be.
Maybe change always comes unevenly. Technology is the expression of a culture, and it changes over time with our desires. Now there are many reasons for us to want to go lighter. When I see articles about 300-square-foot houses that have everything one needs, I think to myself: that’s an ultralite tent turned into a suburban house! When I go to an Amory Lovins lecture and he throws what looks like a bowling ball at the audience and they shrink away, and it turns out to be made of carbon fibre and nearly weightless, and Lovins explains that the material is strong enough to make car bodies, which would make cars so light they would get hundreds of miles to the gallon, I think to myself: those are like ultralite boots! (which, by the way, are simply marvellous these days). When I read about the 2000 Watt Society living on 2000 watts per year, I understand that they are doing ultralite in an ordinary urban setting.
On and on it goes, in one field after another. It’s a design ethos coalescing, a way of being in the world, a style. New York and San Francisco are building 200-square-foot apartments.
It’s higher tech for lower impact. It is emphatically not a return to a simpler past, but rather an advance into the most sophisticated civilisation yet, a light and vivid permaculture. Ultralite design makes us both more alive to the planet and more skillfully comfortable upon it. In a world of seven billion people, with more to come, it will be crucial to living well, while passing along to the generations to come the same Earth that nourishes us.
You know who you are, young and old both, on the John Muir Trail, staggering under what look to me like enormous nylon SUVs: throw that monster off your back!