Keep your expectations in line with the reality of backpacking

Page 1 - Have Realistic Expectations

Page 2 - Training for Backpacking

While deciding whether to take up backpacking, it helps to have clear and realistic expectations of what backpacking consists of.

Backpacking is stomping through mud so thick that you can lose your boot, bothered by mosquitoes and gnats that it seems figure you are the only thing in the forest worth chasing after (and called in all their friends and relatives to join the dinner party).

Backpacking is waking with a day full of hopeful exploring ahead of you, cooking oatmeal and coffee and bisquits while you watch the sunrise on the mountains.

Backpacking is getting so tired from the weight of that pack that setting up the tent and cooking dinner are tasks that you barely have energy for, hitting that point of muscular exhaustation that your soreness wakes you up at night.

Backpacking is a lot like life - a potential for incredible good and beauty, but to reach it you have to put up with some hard work, some suffering and endurance.

In my articles I am guilty of stressing the great backpacking moments - the enthusiasm and hope of mornings, the incredible sunsets, sweet mountain solitude.

I do not write enough the long arduous climbs over mountain passes, the rainy days turning into evenings, trying to avoid dangerous thunderstorms, the thin high altitude air that causes you to stop every ten steps to catch your breath, the uncertainty of whether my food is secure enough to withstand a post midnight visit by a aggressive bruin.

It is important to be mentally and physically prepared to deal with the tough parts of backpacking, so that one can glean the most enjoyment from the visit to wilderness.

I have read that after taking the time and expense of buying backpacking equipment, many people only go backpacking once, because of unrealistic expectations and inadequate physical preparation.

Read what Robert Louis Stevenson had to see about the tough part of backpacking trips: (he called them "walking tours." )

"During the first day or so of any tour there are moments of bitterness, when the traveler feels more than coldly towards his knapsack, when his is half in a mind to throw it bodily over the hedge. . . " "And yet it soon acquires a property of easiness. It becomes magnetic; the spirit of the journey enters into it."

Robert Louis Stevenson: Walking Tours

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