Is the pack half empty or half full?

Let the Bay Chapter Backpacking Section guide you into some of nature's most wonderful experiences

Photo by Erwin Keller. From a 2002 backpack trip to Emigrant Wilderness.

Editor's note. The author of this article is highly biased. He loves backpacking - with the Sierra Club, alone, or under any other conditions. He also loves purple prose. If you are looking for unadorned objective information about the horrors of backpacking, seek elsewhere.

Madness - you may say - madness. Putting 20 or 40 or 60 pounds on your back and walking miles and miles away from home and hospitals to sleep on the cold hard ground through rain and hail and gloom of night. Mail carriers insist on top salaries and benefits for similar work.

That's one possible description of backpacking. Try another.

Backpacking is a way of thinking and a way of life. Backpacking is the means to a sense of solitude and spirituality found only in the remote mountains. It is as close to complete freedom as you will experience on earth. Striding a remote mountain path, with everything you need to survive strapped to your back, your mind clears and you become energized. You abandon quotidian cares. You become master of your fate.

So is the pack half empty or half full? Try it. Only you can decide.

The journey

You can't just click your heels to wake instantly in an ethereal wonderland of snow-capped peaks, pine forests, and high meadows a-riot with wildflowers and turbulent streams. You do have to work and sweat to get there, lugging your pack on your back. You do have to transcend a certain level of physical discomfort to attain that special plane where you fully appreciate where you are and what you're doing. It's quite a journey, and the purpose of the Bay Chapter Backpack Section is to help you get there.

When you sign up for one of our backpack trips, listed both on-line at: www.sfbay.sierraclub.org/backpacking and in each Yodeler, your highly skilled trip leader will quiz you on your preparedness and coach you on appropriate clothing, footwear, rain gear, backpack, sleeping bag, sleeping pad, tent, etc. If you desire, your leader will teach you the basics of route-finding and map and compass use. For sure you will learn about wilderness ethics, wilderness hygiene, and personal safety.

Some leaders might demonstrate the use of a global positioning system (GPS). You will learn how to leave a campsite cleaner than you found it, taking nothing but pictures, leaving nothing behind but footprints. Most of all, you will learn about yourself, and you'll probably make enduring friendships. All my friends of any consequence are backpackers and peak freaks.

Options

The Backpack Section leads trips for a wide range of folks: leisurely paced trips for beginners (and others who prefer a lighter pace), moderately paced intermediate trips, more advanced strenuous trips. For those bent on self-destruction there are knee-jarring, spine-wrenching, sweat-blinding, eyeball-bulging crosscountry grunts guaranteed to at least half kill you! Use the ratings included in every listing to find the kind of trip you seek, and talk to trip leaders if you are in doubt. Most of our trips are two- or three-day weekenders, but some weeklong trips bring you much deeper into the wilds.

Food is another area of variation. Some trips use "central commissary": we all eat the same food, cooked in the same pot, with menus prepared by your leader. The leader distributes a fair share of the load of pots, stoves, fuel, and food to each participant. With "hot-water commissary" you bring your own dehydrated meals and reconstitute them in hot water provided by the leader. Other trips are listed as "individual" or "car commissary", where you bring your own stove, fuel, and food, or share these within your car. Whatever the backpack, it's important to eat enough to keep your internal boiler thoroughly stoked.

Many stores feature spring sales for the "next backpacking season", but come hail or high water, many of us backpack year-round. In the dead of winter and the spring we roam the coastal ranges from the Sinkiyone Wilderness on the North Coast to the fabulous Ventana Wilderness by Big Sur, and the massive expanse of Henry Coe State Park barely an hour's drive south of San Francisco. Many Bay Chapter backpack leaders also lead snowshoe and snow-camping trips during the winter; these are listed through the Snow Camping and Backcountry Skiing Sections (see the November Yodeler or the Chapter web site: www.sfbaysc.org)

for more about these). In the spring we also explore the great deserts of California. These desert trips usually take more time since they involve a much longer drive. In the summer and fall we explore and enjoy our magnificent Sierra Nevada.

I love it; you might too

For over half my lifetime, backpacking has been a cornerstone of my existence. After 38 years I'm still out there, though I'm a bit slower, and I count every ounce on my back.

Becoming a backpack trip leader has been extraordinarily good for me, allowing me to experience unimaginable personal growth. The friendships and the memories will accompany me into old age. It's been a great ride. And it isn't over yet! Hope to see you up the next mountain, eh?

Patrick Colgan