Out with a stripper
By Cam Burns |
Memo back: Heather, holy crap! Lemme pile it on the bathroom scales and get back to you. Cam
Recently, while preparing for a climbing trip, the aforequoted memo sent me into a headlesspullet- style keel. Fifty pounds!? Was she nuts!? I’d never done a big trip with less than about two hundred pounds of stuff.While I travel like Burke and Wills crossing Oz in the 1860s (they toted a wagon that converted into a boat, in case they encountered a rumored inland sea), small mountaineering expeditions require the utmost caution in weight — bodily and otherwise.
Time to cut the fat. For me, that meant fewer Big N’ Tastys and digging out some old kit from a 2000 South America trip, where my chums and I had pared the load to a minimal but comfy heft, and went without whatever we could.
Most of the decisions were easy because crampons, ice tools, sleeping bags and other gear are — despite what the marketing hoodsters say — fairly similar in weight. When a certain performance standard is required, gear from most firms typically spins the scales’ dial about the same distance. But one area I knew I could save some weight was on the pack.
Packs have done some really funny things in the last thirty years. The second backpack I ever owned was a Karrimor jobbie I bought in 1976 from an outdoor gear store in Penrith, in the Lake District (near the Balkans). Some shyster walked off with it from the base of Castle Rock in Boulder Canyon while I was doing a route, but I miss that baby. She was basic: two straps stitched onto a bag. No bells, no whistles, no bullony. No padding, too. Stick a hammer- shaped piece of metal in and you’d be begging for Advil after half a hour.
Maybe it was English frugality, maybe it was just the period, but as the ’80s progressed, packs seemed to get more and more fancy, with more and more doodads, and more and more complication, until they went to minimal again, only to go high-gadget again, only to go minimal again. Have you kept up? It’s like women’s fashions on steroids.
Today, I reckon we’re in a sort of Twilight Zone for Backpacks: gear companies are touting the incredibly lightness of their packs (and for good reason: the materials are lighter than ever), but they’re also trying to tout the features: things that go shazzam in the night.
That’s why I recently dug out my 2000 South America pack: the Kelty Phantom (the modern version is the Kelty Cloud 5250).
The three-pound-twelve-ounce Phantom was different for me on a number of fronts: First, it remains the most costly piece of gear I’ve ever bought (about $550). No matter what ploy I tried on Kelty, I wasn’t getting a pro deal, a bro deal, a schmoe deal — only the go deal: “Go away and buy it from one of our retailers, Burns.” Actually, the guys at Kelty were pretty friendly, and no one really said that — so I did. Buy one, that is, from REI — because the pack was perfect for what I needed. The white sack was made from Spectra, one of the strongest and lightest fibers available (marketeers tout it as “pound-for-pound, ten times stronger than steel ... ”). The eight gear loops on the pack were removable. They were simply clipped with Fastex-type clips that could be rotated so the clips would go inside an attaching sleeve and the thin plastic gear loops would be accessible. There were three big removable pockets. The lid was removable. The entire padded waist harness was removable. (You thread a strap through the pack and ditch the padded version.) The Phantom was an amazing stripper. I spent many hours on my first day with her (I called her Lexy) playing with the accouterments and taking off her pretty things — until she was a Twiggyesque one-pound, fourounces. Frusilla got jealous: “You never take me out like that,” she said one day as we packed on a friend’s lawn in Boulder.
“I promise a night at City Market when we get back,” I joked.
It’s possible to wax on about gear all day long — what I do in the tub — but what’s more important about gear is you recognize it for its niche applications. In South America, I’d needed a pack that could carry a huge load (and I have suidae Gregoires and Gleasons that are far more comfortable than the Phantom), then, they must become a several-day pack for a technical route.When I’d needed such dual personalities in the past, I’d simply shoved a small mountaineering pack in the pig along with the rest of the stuff. With the Phantom, I got the best of both worlds.
I’ve only ever used my Phantom once. It was too damn expensive to thrash around on desert towers and roadside crags. Too damn white to be used for lugging stuff through filthy airports in third world countries. It sat in my gear closet for years — seemingly to be used never again. A $550 investment with one purpose, one trip.
Now, pulling it out reminds me why gear is so specific, so specialized. I’ve read that others have replaced two or three packs with the Kelty Phantom and the Cloud. They’re nuts. I would never do a huge backpacking trip with Lexy. I’d never do a day route with her. But for several days, of both loadmuling then technical climbing, it’s back into the niche situation, I guess, and I’m glad to see her.
Cam Burns is double parked in a parallel universe. He can be reached at jonathanhemlock@ hotmail.com.
