(expenses and rewards)

• Initial expense required
  
• Backpacking equipment usually durable
  
• An activity with rich rewards

The cost of preparing yourself to go backpacking can be initially rather high, since what you need is a good backpack ($100+), a good sleeping bag ($100), a stove ($70+), good hiking boots ($70+), and a light weight tent ($120+).

If you are new to backpacking you can start with a less expensive items, and upgrade your gear slowly. A simple old-fashioned pup tent works fine and often costs only about $30.

Used backpacks can be picked up at Garage Sales or on Ebay. Rei-outlet.com and Campmor.com often have internet deals and clearances. (I got my Kelty Tioga from Campmor for only $119 - it is a super external-frame backpack!).

Once you have all your gear and it holds up well, backpacking becomes an inexpensive form of recreation. The longer your gear lasts before you have to replace it, the less backpacking costs. Most backpacks and tents are usually built with enough durability that it is not uncommon for them to hold up through 5 or 10 seasons (or more).

Probably the best thing you can do to keep your gear long-lived it to unpack it as soon as you get home and lay everything out to dry in an unused portion of the house, so as to prevent mildew.

Although backpacking does not cost much after you have acquired your gear, there is no other activity that gives you richer rewards, physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

If you backpack often you will become in good physical shape, by the preparation needed before hitting the trails (mostly walking), and by the strenuous labor on the trail. (carrying a heavy pack is hard work). When the going gets very tough backpacking I think of what Aldo Leopold said about too much comfort and safety:

"We all strive for safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. . .

A measure of success in this is all well enough, and perhaps is a requisite to objective thinking, but too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau's dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men."

Backpacking up to wilderness is like an emotional cleansing, that clears the junk of civilized life out of your psyche. Instead of fighting traffic, stretching and saving to make ends meet, you deal with crossing a snow-swollen stream to reach that perfect campsite in an open meadow next to 100 foot tall spruce, where you can climb a avalanche-cleared slope to see the afternoon sun light up the mountains above the dark forest.

Although every one has his own ideas about divinity , I for one cannot travel up into the mountains without feeling that this wildness I love so much is closer to the source of creation. I don't need to have any interpretation for what I sense as dusk falls on the tall trees, and the thrush's song echoes across the still valley air, or when I climb out of the tent and night and wonder up at all the stars in the mountain sky. I am certain that I will recall these feelings, and the sense of the divine, when my time comes to leave this world, knowing that I have had a preview of the mystery of heaven.