What does it mean to go backpacking? Join me and my friend Mark as we discuss the roots of backpacking and how far we have come. We recorded live in Jan 2023 on a frigid night in North Texas. I hope you enjoy it!
What does it mean to go backpacking? Join me and my friend Mark as we discuss the roots of backpacking and how far we have come. We recorded live in Jan 2023 on a frigid night in North Texas. I hope you enjoy it!
Hey everybody. Welcome to the Natural Medic Adventures Special Edition Podcast 2023 broadcasting from the Cross Timbers Trail on Lake Texoma South side, close to I guess Gordonville, Texas. I have a familiar guest right here, Hi to everybody. It's Mark from Camping Forge. Mark is back. We're out here on the trail for one night and we decided we'd do a special edition podcast since we're out here and we wanna talk about backpacking since we're out here backpacking. What constitutes a backpacking trip. So I'll give my kind of end of the deal and I'll hand it over to Mark and let him talk about it and what he thinks, and we'll go from there. So if that sounds good, please join us. Basically, backpacking, it's probably been around for a little over a hundred years as far as a recreational activity and obviously you're gonna need a backpack in order to do this. Back in the day, I can think of some of the pioneers of backpacking and maybe not celebrated as such, but like John Muir, his crazy self would, put a crust of bread on the back of his peck in a bed roll and maybe a few other supplies. He would take his nap sack. because back then it was probably just like a canvas, what we call a backpack, like a, almost like a school backpack these days. And he would take that and he would throw it down in a crevasse or a ravine and he would try to challenge himself to go down in there and find it. There's some stories that I heard about John Muir and I've read a lot of his writings and he's definitely an inspiration, to me for getting out and enjoying, the outdoors and the wilderness. So it doesn't have to be that extreme though. I would say, a backpacking trip to me, like today, we started a little bit late. I was supposed to be meeting Mark over here about two o'clock. I got here about a little after three. We got on the trail finally about four, yeah, about four o'clock. and hiked into, normally we stay at Five Mile Camp, but since we started late it was already occupied by some some nice ladies and they did not want to share it with us. We of did our own thing and moved a little bit back to another site a little bit further back on the trail, back towards the trail head. Here we are right now. We've got a fire going. We've got enough room for him to set up, for Mark to set up his tarp and me to set up my one person tent. We did probably all, all in all today we did, about two and a half miles. So I really don't think backpacking is limited to miles. If you hiked in, a quarter mile, heck, a hundred feet and you had to use your backpack, as a primary transportation, apparatus or device to bring in your gear, cuz they call it backpacking because you have the backpack on your back and you're carrying all your stuff inside of said backpack. So ideally all of your gear should fit inside or on that backpack. It really, to me, doesn't matter how far you go, what matters is the experience, I didn't have but really one night to do this. So I contacted Mark and I said, Hey, you wanna go to Cross Timbers? Cause it's a good halfway point for us to meet. It's only about an hour from his house, and it's about an hour and a half from my house. So why not, the trail's not particularly challenging. It is, not exactly a, an easy trail. There are some ups and downs. and there's some rocky areas and, sketchy areas where the trails eroded and stuff like that. You could, you could fall down, mark Yes. And that's, that, that kind of thing happens. But overall, really I think it's the spirit of getting out and, enjoying the adventure no matter how long the adventure is, whether the adventure is. Maybe a hundred feet in the primitive campsite on the Texas State Park or some other state park system, or, a couple of miles down a backpacking trail on, on a Corps of Engineer's Lake in, our case case in North Texas, just right across the border from Oklahoma. It really doesn't matter what the length of it is, what matters, the spirit of it, and you know how you get there. So that's my take for now. Mark, you, what do you Yeah, I actually, I'm bur I'll let you hold it. Sure. Yeah. So I would be more. I think the biggest difference between backpacking and let's say if you were to do like bushcraft, which is a cousin to, to backpacking, is the thought behind the trip. So if you were for example, like I, I do like to do bushcraft or outdoor survival and. And there, when you're doing that, sometimes, for example, one of the techniques you wanna practice, particularly if you were safe, can we talk about John Muir is what would've been like to hike around with something like a wool blanket Now a wool blanket's very heavy. It's four or five pounds. It's not, if you're a backpacker, you're like, Oh, like that's something you don't wanna carry. Like it's just too heavy. Or people shave toothbrushes in half to save four ounces, so you don't wanna carry a wool blanket. But and back in the day they, they, that's why they had mules and wagons and sled sleds and stuff. And so I really think it's really the intent behind the miles is, cuz for example, yeah, I agree with Craig and. and if you were to go just, one of the benefits of going say at a state park and where you've only a couple hundred yards from your car is we can carry more stuff. And that's also whether you wanted to say, Hey, I wanna try out what it was like to sleep in wool blanket before we had sleeping pads and modern sleeping bags. That's one thing. And cuz you don't have to carry it very far. The second benefit too is if. If you relax your concept of backpacking, if if you switch your mind from saying, I want to go do 10 miles, 20 miles, a hundred miles, to, Hey, I wanna be able to leverage the fact that if I hike in somewhere, I can see more spots and have more I can get away from people like you're not at a crowded. State Park, national Park type area. And also you can be more imaginative cuz where we're at is Cross Timbers trail is is on Lake Texoma and there's spots where the campsite have Beach access of people often sometimes kayak over, but also, for example, in New Year's one of my friends organized a trip and we came out here with about 30 people and he lives nearby. So his friend has a pontoon boat. So that we actually used the pontoon boat to carry in extra supply. 20 of us hiked in. But we leveraged the pontoon boat to bring a lot of extra supplies. So we had fun New Year's Eve. So meaning why we brought a chainsaw. So cuz we are fi you can make campfires down wood here. But you felt there's a lot of big logs. You need a saw. Craig's laughing cuz in the dark. I've misplaced my saw, so we'll find it in the morning. But having a chainsaw is also much better than having a manual saw cuz we were able to cut pretty much any log we found. Second thing we brought like tables, we, and we brought a lot of food out and had a good time. So again, I think the big thing is about the spirit of adventure. And to be able to see things experience, nature in ways we can't when we're just limited to a drive-in campsite. Absolutely. Absolutely. And I, excuse me. And I think just what you were saying, mark, think about where we came. A hundred years ago they didn't have modern sleeping bags and they had to carry in a wool blanket. And with the canvas nap sack and the, the canvas nap sack, by itself, which is made of that heavy material, we would balk of that today because we have material that's so lightweight and expensive, but still we have so much better materials that are so much, excuse me, we're getting all, we're getting all choked up here. This is nostalgia. It's choking us up here. But they didn't have the technology to develop these, really, let's think about it, modern masterpieces. We, there's backpacks out there today on the market that, they cost several hundred dollars just for the backpack itself. but they weigh a pound or so, or maybe even less depending on the configuration and how they're set up. And do you have to have something like that? You don't have to have something like that. Not too long ago I was in Santa Fe, New Mexico with my mom. Back in August when I went up into the Sangre de Christos and did some backpacking and we were scouring around to different thrift stores and we were in a, we were in a goodwill and I found an old I think it was an Eddie Bauer branded external frame pack. And I think it was meant for scouts cuz it was a smaller pack, but, harkens me back to my early days of experiencing backpacking as a scout and using those external frame packs, looking back on those and thinking about how primitive those were, and that was just, not that long ago, that was back in the eighties and nineties, that a majority of people that were backpacking were using those external frame packs. and I think this particular model was Eddie Bauer branded, but I think it actually was made by jansport, which still makes backpacks. I don't think they make backpacking backpacks anymore, but back then they did. And, but as we've said, the whole deal about being out here is, enjoying the spirit of adventure. It doesn't matter if you have. this particular pack I was just talking about, I think I paid like$7 for it at the do, at the Dollar store or at the thrift store. And did a video about it on my YouTube channel. And would it still work for somebody today? Of course it would. If you just have a book bag laying around. and you wanna use that to go backpacking, do it. Whatever gets you out there, because it's all about the adventure and enjoying yourself as you go out, doesn't really matter what you're equipment is. there's a bunch of people on, on YouTube and on the internet that would like to flex on you and talk about how, how cool they are. Cuz they shaved off, their toothbrush handle and they saved four ounces cuz they're, they're an ultra lighter and that's fine. That's the way they wanna do it. That's the cool thing about backpacking is you don't have to do it a specific certain way. There are of course, better ways to do things. and and as you upgrade your equipment becomes lighter and it becomes more comfortable for you, and that helps you have a better adventure, but you do not have to have the lightest, most high tech stuff to get out there on the trail. Anything to add on that, mark? Mark? No, I think that's exactly it. Most importantly, just use what you got. Get out. If it's heavier, you might be a little limited to, how many miles you want to go or be able to go comfortably, but just get out there. Exactly. So that's our message for tonight, y'all just get out there and enjoy yourself and do it responsibly. Make sure you leave no trace, make sure that you're following regulations. We were, last weekend we were in dinosaur Valley. Excuse me. We were in Dinosaur Valley State. On the other side of the metroplex, and because of their regulations there, we could not have a fire and it was cold, not as cold as it is tonight, which thank God we have ability to have fire. It's gonna hit the freezing mark by sometime between now and morning. So we are happy that we have the ability to make fire and gather firewood, and actually start fires legally. In the state park system in Texas, at most primitive sites, they don't let you do that because most of them are far away from water and from resources in case a fire did break out. And it damages the landscape as well cuz people are not very or let's say people are not always as responsible as they should be when they're when they're having fires. So anyway, with that in mind have a great time. After you listen to this, I don't know if this will be evening or morning or whenever you're listening to this, but hope you enjoy that and get out there and enjoy nature. Okay, bye.