I have a friend who, the night before any hiking trip, empties his entire pack onto the living room floor and puts half of it back in the closet. He has done this for thirty years. He owns one good rain jacket, one good midlayer, one good pair of trousers. He has owned them for years. He does not browse the gear websites. He does not watch the YouTube reviews. He goes into the mountains with what he has, and he has been doing this long enough that the mountains have stopped being a test of equipment and started being the thing itself.
I used to find this admirable in a slightly remote, monkish way. Now, after years of watching my own gear pile grow and shrink and grow again, I think he is the only sane person in the room. The outdoor industry has spent the last two decades convincing us that every trip is incomplete until we have acquired the latest fabric, the lightest shelter, the most efficient stove. Each new piece of gear is a small promise — that we will be warmer, drier, safer, faster. Each one is also, mostly, a duplication of something we already own.
The Religion of New Fabrics
There is a particular pleasure in buying new gear. I will not pretend otherwise. The unwrapping of a new piece of equipment, the smell of the factory packaging, the careful reading of the care label — these are small private joys, and there is no reason to be puritanical about them. But there is a strange inversion happening in the outdoor world that I think we have begun to accept without examining. The point of the equipment has stopped being the trip. The trip has become the occasion to use the equipment.
You can see this in the way people talk about outdoor activities now. A generation ago, someone would say they were going hiking, and the conversation would be about the trail. Today, the conversation is more likely to be about the pack, the shoes, the layering system. The hike itself has become almost an afterthought, the backdrop against which the gear is displayed. I have lost count of the number of conversations I have had where the trail itself — its particular landscape, its difficulty, its weather — was less interesting to my companion than the gram weight of their new tent.
This is not a moral failing. It is the predictable consequence of an industry that needs you to keep buying things. And it has produced, in many of us, a kind of gear anxiety. We have begun to distrust our ability to make do. We have begun to believe that the trip cannot happen without the correct kit, and that the correct kit is the one with the latest revision. We have stopped trusting the older stuff, even when it works perfectly well, even when it has worked perfectly well for fifteen years.
What You Learn When You Carry Less
There is a famous exercise in ultralight hiking called shakedown. You pack everything you think you need for a trip. Then you unpack it, item by item, and ask of each thing: do I really need this? You do this with a partner, ideally someone honest enough to call you out. The exercise is humbling. Most people cut their pack weight by a third on the first shakedown, and another ten percent on the second. The leftover items are always things you were carrying out of fear — fear of being cold, fear of being hungry, fear of being uncomfortable, fear of being judged by other hikers.
What you discover, when you actually carry less, is that the fear was doing most of the work. You were not carrying the spare fleece because you were cold. You were carrying it because you had imagined being cold, and the imagined coldness had somehow become more real than the real temperature. The same was true of the second water filter, the third pair of socks, the backup headlamp. None of these things got used. They were insurance policies against an imagined future.
I find this revealing about something larger. We carry a great deal, in life, that we do not actually need. We carry opinions we do not actually hold. We carry resentments we do not actually feel. We carry ambitions we do not actually want. We carry these things out of a vague fear of who we would be without them, and the carrying itself becomes the activity. The shakedown, the act of asking whether each item is necessary, is one of the most useful things the outdoor world has to teach.
The Beauty of the Single Object
There is a particular kind of object that gets better the more you use it. A cast iron pan. A wool blanket. A good knife. A leather boot that has been re-soled twice. These objects do not degrade with use. They deepen. They take on the patina of the trips and the meals and the years. They become, in some small way, a record of the life that has worn them.
The outdoor industry is not, by and large, in the business of making these objects. The outdoor industry is in the business of selling you the next thing. The next iteration. The next fabric weight. The next colourway. The next collaboration with a designer you have never heard of. None of this is evil. But it is in tension with the kind of relationship you can have with a single object over a long time.
When I think about the gear I love most, it is not the newest gear. It is the gear I have used the most. My grandfather's old wool jumper, which I have been wearing on cold evenings for fifteen years, and which has gotten softer and more honest-looking with every wash. The pair of leather boots I bought in my twenties and have re-soled four times. The aluminium kettle I have used on camp stoves and home stoves and the stove at the cabin, and which has a small dent on one side from the time I dropped it on a beach in Wales.
These objects are not, by any measure, optimal. They are heavier than the modern equivalents. They lack the latest features. They would not, in any head-to-head review, win. But they have a quality that no review can measure, which is that they are part of my life in a way the newer objects are not. They have been somewhere with me. They have lasted long enough to become more than themselves.
A Practice of Carrying
I am not going to tell you what to own. That would be a strange kind of article, and it would miss the point. The point of the minimalist philosophy is not a checklist. The point is a relationship. A relationship with your kit, with the trips you take, and with the idea of what an outdoor life is actually for.
What I will say is this. The next time you are packing for a trip, take everything out. Lay it on the floor. Look at it. For each item, ask whether it is something you actually use, or something you are carrying because someone convinced you it was necessary. Be ruthless. You will probably be surprised at how much you can leave behind, and how little difference it makes on the trail.
Then, when you are out, pay attention to the things you actually reach for. The things that come out of the pack every day. The things you would grab if the pack had to be abandoned in a hurry. These are your real kit. Everything else is commentary.
The outdoor world does not need more gear. It needs more attention. It needs more people on the trail who are there for the trail, and less time on the forums comparing the gram weights of two competing tents. The mountain is the same mountain it was when our grandparents walked it, with their heavy wool and their leather boots and their cast iron cookware. It is just as beautiful. It is just as hard. It is just as ready for us, whenever we are ready to show up with less.
There is also something to be said for the small social grace of not having much. The hiker with the giant pack and the pristine kit announces themselves, on the trail, as someone who has spent the previous weeks preparing. The hiker with the small pack and the well-used kit announces themselves as someone who has spent the previous years preparing. The two announcements are not equivalent. One is a display of consumption. The other is a display of practice. The second one tends, in my experience, to make friends more easily.
I do not mean to romanticise austerity. The minimalist is not, in my view, someone who suffers for the sake of suffering. The minimalist is someone who has discovered that the things they actually use are fewer than the things they were told they needed, and who has quietly stopped buying the things they do not use. It is a small discipline. It does not require a particular temperament. It only requires the willingness to look honestly, once, at what is in the closet, and to notice how much of it has not been touched since the last trip.
Once you start noticing this, it is hard to stop. You notice it in the kitchen, where you have three whisks and use one. You notice it in the bathroom, where you have seven products and use two. You notice it in the closet, where the hungriest items are the ones you have not worn in a year. None of this is, strictly speaking, about outdoor gear. But the outdoor practice, if you let it, teaches you to see it everywhere. The trail is a classroom. The closet is the exam.