This section contains my tips for reducing your pack weight and for making your hike more enjoyable. These tips are based on my personal experience and are by no means all of the good ideas available from other hikers.

Tips to reduce pack weight

• Get a kitchen scale and weigh everything, ounces (grams) add up

• Make a gear list to track each item's weight. Keep copies of your previous year’s gear lists as they are good to track your progress and you may need to go back to a previous system when changes don’t work out. It happens.

• Prioritize reducing your big four: tent, sleeping bag, mattress, (and lastly) your pack. As you gain experience and reduce the volume of your gear the size of your pack could shrink saving even more weight.

• Strive for each item to have multiple uses. For example trekking poles used as tent poles, a long sleeve shirt worn as a short sleeve shirt, long pants that coverts to shorts, or a down puffy that also serves as a pillow.

• Minimize stuff sacks, e.g. stuff your puffy with your sleeping bag or into its sleeve.

• Repackage food, insect repellant, hand sanitizer, foot powder, etc. Most of these items come in quantities far more than you would need on a backpacking segment or even an entire hike. Use smaller and lighter containers for all of the consumables you take.

• Weigh your fuel canisters and take the one that best fits your trip duration. I have a variety of partially used canisters and save weight by taking the lightest one that will do the job. On really short trips I take a pair of canisters and use up the lightest one and recycle the can when I get home.

• Eliminate extra clothes, ideally one set and master layering. I take basically a single set of clothing and launder them at trail towns. Underwear and socks get laundered as I go.

• If you use a stuff sack for your quilt or sleeping bag you can stuff your evening and sleeping clothes in the same sack.

• With a lighter pack you can afford more luxury items but don’t go overboard. My Garmin inReach Mini is not technically needed but is fun for friends to track my progress and to give my family peace of mind.

• If you want to try out a new lighter item consider taking both your old item and the new item on a shakedown hike. If the new item doesn’t work out you have the old item to fall back on. Be safe out there.

• After each trip sort your items into essential for safety, used, and did not use. Next time consider leaving some "Did not use" items at home.

• Food can be the heaviest thing in your pack by far. Work on dialing in the amount of food you need by weighing what you take and weighing what you bring home. Strive to take just the right amount of food next time. I documented the calories of food I took and how much weight I lost on a 29 day backpack. From this I could determine the number of calories I actually needed per day to keep a constant weight. Every person is different and there are many factors that can significantly change the number of calories you need per day. Temperature can have a big impact and you burn more calories in cold weather to keep warm. Experiment with the food you carry to dial it in. Until you dial it in you should carry a little extra. If I am not sure how many days it will take for a segment I generally bring one day’s extra food.

• Eat breakfast in town on the first day and dinner in town on the last day of each segment. Those days will have fewer calories in your pack.

Tips for on the trail

• Consider sleeping at dry camps away from water sources. They are often dryer, warmer and have fewer bugs.

• Sleep with electronics to retain battery life. Also, the battery gauge in my cell phone gets really confused if it gets cold and thinks the battery is almost dead when it is not.

• Sleep with water filter if its below freezing. Microporous filters will not filter out the bad stuff if they ever get frozen and the fibers are damaged.

• Stuff your quilt or sleeping bag first in the morning. This is a way to warm up in the morning while still in your tent.

• Prepare your meals in food pouches to save cleanup. This goes for freeze dried dinners and oatmeal packets.

• Camel-up (which means to drink lots of water) at water sources to save pack weight.

• Pack each day’s snacks and lunch into separate bags to make it quick and easy to get organized each day. Portioning out each day’s snacks into separate bags helps to make sure you don’t eat too much at first and run out later.

• Mail resupply and bounce boxes to businesses with evening and weekend hours. It can be really frustrating and disruptive to arrive just after the Post Office closes for the day or worse, the weekend.

• A bounce box contains items you may need at the end of each segment but you don’t want to carry. Utilize a bounce box to forward resupply items and items such as battery chargers to your next trail town. After you resupply the items you need, forward the remainder to the next town. The bounce box can also contain several segments worth of prepackaged dinners that may be hard to source in a trail town. Take the food out you need for the next segment and forward the rest.

• Tear out guide book pages as you go or include the pages you need in your resupply boxes.

• Ditch the camp shoes. Hike in shoes that are comfortable enough to wear in camp.

• Dig your “cat” hole in the evening when it is warmer so it is ready first thing in the morning.

• Part of the enjoyment on the trail is sharing the experience with fellow hikers. Take time to chat with others.