I had this revelation moment once during the early days of my hiking career. It was a very silly thing but it was symbolic. It opened a big door.

Pack and tent in the old days

The learning process of a novice backpacker

The background scene is a challenging, cross-country hike in a relatively remote setting. My mental frame has always been in the ultralight but I was still lacking experience back then and my equipment was good quality but far from a lightweight ideal. I was hiking with a partner and being the stronger one in the party I was carrying all the common items in a huge, heavily loaded pack. All this to justify myself about my following the dark side of heavy packing and to come up to the main point in the discussion: the tent -a sturdy, classic dome- that I carried strapped outside. Not really because it didn’t fit inside but because it was my only known standard for tent carrying. Then something happened…

We came to this forested section of taiga-like conifers, a very thick wood of rather stunted trees with entangling branches all over the place, down to the ground. Crossing this was a horror movie but it was a couple miles necessary evil in the grand scheme of the trip.

It’d have been difficult enough to move through with no pack. I thought a streamlined pack would surely help. Not that the monster in my back could be streamlined at all but as far as things strapped outside, it was only the tent. In a huge, out the box jump, I squeezed it inside. It needed a bit of compression (the tent was a huge packed bundle for modern, lightweight standards) but it fit.

It suddenly made plenty of sense. It did make sense apart and beyond the forested section crossing: I realized that I was carrying the tent strapped outside not because it didn’t fit inside but because outside was its perceived natural place.

I was just following the beaten path, the packing dogma, the natural order in the galaxy. I had never even thought a tent could go inside a pack. And suddenly there it was. My packing set was still just as heavy and nearly just as big but it now was fully symmetric and more aesthetically balanced. It made much better sense.

Heavy but elegant

It was a paradigm eureka moment. The tent stayed nicely inside for the rest of the trip and no questions were asked. It was a turning point that changed my approach to packing.

We went through the giant tangle and survived. Then we arrived at a river crossing that turned out nearly chest deep and then many other things happened (we survived them all). We learnt a lot in the process. We learnt to question the (packing) dogma. It was all downhill from there.