This spring I happened to re-read Richard Leider's excellent book, Repacking Your Bags - Lighten Your Load. The metaphor the book explores is how at certain times, it is good to "unpack our backpacks" with everything we're carrying, examine the contents, and then "repack" just what is needed for the next life stage. Otherwise, over our lives, we just keep adding "more stuff" to our backpacks and that get heavier and heavier and weighing us down.
Well, we've been talking a lot about our backpacks on this trip - our backpacks with much too much heavy stuff! In planning for this trip, we worked off several recommended packing lists for hikers taking the Walker's Haute Route and we thought we were packing light . . . . however, we've realized that even though each individual item might be light, we still have too much stuff in our backpacks!
On our challenging trip up to the 2nd mountain hut, there was a group of older German hikers (we're guessing in their 70s plus) who just blew by us on the boulder field. Clearly, in addition to probably having spent their whole lives hiking similar mountains, they had much lighter packs. So we've been talking to all our fellow hikers about what they brought and the size and weight of their backpacks.
On one extreme is a young Australian couple (they are both physicians) who are trail runners. Their packs are 20 litres - they are even sharing a toothbrush with the end cut off in an effort to keep their packs light.
More typical is Brian, an American who lives in Switerland. His pack is about 36 litres.
Now contrast those two examples with Greg's pack which is closer to 75 litres.
Need I say more? We have decided that we really do like hiking and we need to learn to "repack our bags" to lighten our loads!
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