(Back)packing it in
I’ve tried hard—darn hard—for 400 miles, but I think the time has come to admit the obvious: this isn’t working. I need to pack it in.
Not the hike, mind you, and not the blog either (was that a groan of disappointment I heard?) but my Gossamer Gear Mariposa backpack.
When I got to my hotel room in Bishop, I took my shirt off to shower and looked in the mirror. We don’t have many of those in the wilderness, and it showed a lump the size of a golf ball on my collar bone!
I cannot, for all me and my PhD in science are worth, get my pack to stop pulling back against my shoulders and collarbones. Even the shoulder straps show strain on the front, not the top:
Packing it differently doesn’t seem to help. Shifting more weight to my hips makes a small difference, but the real problem lies in a baffling design decision: the straps meant to pull the top of the pack towards your back are not connected to the pack’s aluminum frame, but to loose fabric!
Basically, these should fix it, but they don’t do diddly.
I cannot, for all me and my PhD are worth, fathom why. I even sewed loops out of the webbing inside the pack and tied the anchor points for these straps to the frame:
What you should not need to do to make a ~$300 pack useable.
That helped a little, but as me and my collarbone golf ball can attest, not enough. The frustrating part is that reviewers rave about how comfortable this pack is. And it generally was when I was trying it out at home, though it did have this tendency to pull back against my collarbones a bit.
Gossamer Gear as a company isn’t much help themselves. For years, hikers complained that anything less than five star reviews never showed up on the Gossamer Gear website, so everything from packs to trekking poles to little ties that hold your trekking poles to your pack have five star averages. I returned the $200 trekking poles because the grips were the cheap foam that gets slimy with sweat and hadn’t even been manufactured to be the same shape as each other. The company appears to post all reviews now, but after years of only five star ratings, the damage is done: even a one star warning review might only lower a five star average to 4.9.
Enter Brice at Lower Gear Outdoors in Tempe, Arizona. The pack I should have started with is the smaller brother of one I have and love, the Ultra Light Adventures (ULA) Catalyst. It’s held up for years with only a small tear where my then supervisor scraped it across jagged rocks inside an active New Zealand volcano. And it carries great. The only trouble is that ULA is too small a company for many stores to stock their gear, and they have a ~3 week wait time for new packs! Through the ULA website, I found Lower Gear, who confirmed they had a medium ULA Circuit (the Catalyst’s little brother) in stock. I called at 9:13 AM, and by 10:00, Brice had it set to FedEx overnight to me.
According to Lucinda, owner of the fantastically named Fed Up Store here in Bishop, it should arrive around 11:00 or noon tomorrow. She’s expecting it and will hold onto it until I get there. I’ll send the Mariposa back to Naomi where it can sit in the corner and reflect on its behavior.
Poor thing looks like it knows it did something wrong.
So there you have it: thanks to Brice and Lucinda, I’m packing it in and packing out tomorrow, hopefully one golf ball lighter. I’ll add them to the list of people who’ve made my hike possible.
Update:
Wooooohooooo!
My new pack arrived! I was walking to the Fed Up Store when a car pulled over. Someone leaned out the passenger side and asked if I wanted a ride.
Yes. Yes, please.
Andrew and Amanda were hiking a section of the PCT when the weather got too hot, so they rented a car and are off on a National Park adventure. They even waited for me at Fed Up while I unpacked my old bag, packed the new one, and sent the old one back to Naomi. After all that, they gave me and my new, comfier pack a ride to the grocery store to get second lunch. Oh, but that wasn’t the limit of their kindness: because they aren’t hiking anymore, they had no need for their next food resupply, a five-gallon Home Depot bucket of tasties at Muir Ranch, so they offered it to me, instead.
Sure! Please!
Not only do I have a new pack, but my next resupply is taken care of!? And I have a ride back to the trailhead in a few minutes with Debi and Poncho!?
Uh, wow. Excellent!
Debi and Poncho—one drove, the other climbed around the back of the jeep and whined. Cutely.