2020 UPDATE: It’s been almost half a decade since I originally wrote this piece, and it’s been viewed thousands of times since then. I sat down this year and did a complete review, updating info and links as I went. Virtually all of it has held up to the test of time, and all these years (and miles) later there’s nothing I’d add. The only thing that may seem outdated is the technology I carried to run my business remotely while hiking the trail (iPad Air2 and iPhone 4S). But all the rest holds up and AWOL is still making the best damn guidebooks on the planet.
Best of luck on your adventure…
Cheaper Than Knee Surgery
“You know, my first time out I learned two things,” a man by the name of Hatchet told me as our cookstoves simmered in camp, “If you buy wrong you buy twice, and expensive gear is cheaper than knee surgery.”
He was certainly one who’d know. He’d been given the trail-name Hatchet because he began the Appalachian Trail with—among other things—a hatchet, a five-man tent, two hundred-foot lengths of rope, heavy-duty combat fatigues, a lantern, a flashlight, and a headlamp.
This scenario is way more common than you’d think, even among experienced hikers. I spent many weekends backpacking as a kid, and used to sell equipment for a living. And yet, when I spent a month retracing Bill Bryson’s footsteps on the Appalachian Trail, I still brought almost twenty pounds too much.
The excess weight is killer on the knees, and replacing gear with lighter, more-effective versions is a pain on the wallet. So to help you avoid both I offer a comprehensive guide to my final gear load out.
This is not the stuff I started with, but the stuff I ended with and as such I think it’s a much more useful representation of what a long-distance hike really requires.