LighterPack.com
If you’ve been in the store and talked with me about reducing or defining your backpacking load then I have probably mentioned Lighterpack.com a time or two.
What’s Lighterpack.com? Well, it’s a great tool, hosted at – obviously, lighterpack.com.
It’s free. Completely and totally. I don’t have any affiliation with it other than being a very happy user of the tool. I don’t know any of the people there, they don’t take any money from you or give any to me. Enough with the disclaimers.
So, here is how it works. First, you create a free account on the site. Then, you create some categories to describe how you organize your gear. For example, a typical gear list of mine will have a lot more categories than some people’s but it looks like this: Clothing, Sleep, Kitchen, Pack, Shelter, Hygiene/Meds, General Gear, Raingear, Electronics, Luxury and Food. All of those are free form names and you can have fewer or more categories than me, which is great.
Now that you have some categories, you can begin to populate them with gear. All you have to do is enter a Name and a Description. And the Description is even optional. You also enter the Weight (and the program tracks that info for you.) You can even specify ounces, grams, pounds or kilograms. And if you’re taking more than one of something, there is a Quantity field, too. Items can be marked as Consumable or Worn if this is appropriate. Worn items don’t count towards pack weight but you have them in the list to know they are coming along, while Consumable items are understood to decrease over time as they are – consumed. Lighterpack will tell you how much your Total Weight is, what portion of that is Consumable, what part is Worn, and what your Base Weight is. You can also upload or link photos of items and you can even link to an item on a web page.
So, you go through your categories and populate them with the items you plan to pack for your trip. This is the fun part. You get a chance to look at what you have always thrown into your pack and really analyze it. You can say, well what if instead of a hatchet I took along a wire saw? Swapping 2 pounds for 2 ounces sounds like a good deal as long as you don’t actually NEED a hatchet.
When I create a Lighterpack list these days it is a pretty fast process because all my gear is already listed in there. Once you add an item, it’s there unless you delete it. You can take it out of a list and it just sits off to the side in a box of ‘gear’ waiting to be pulled into a list. You can drag it into your list at any time with your mouse but it isn’t gone. So your initial foray into lighterpack usually takes some time with a scale. Cause we all know the manufacturer weight is never right, don’t we? Cause it’s never right. C’mon you can’t be a gram weenie if you don’t know how many grams your stuff weighs.
So. You just spent 3 days weighing all your stuff and entering it into Lighterpack and now you’re back to finish reading this, right? Right. So, once you get everything in there, this is where you start to make those improvements that only help, never hurt. You can look at things like your tent and sleeping bag and decide if changes are necessary, desired, and valid. There is almost ALWAYS a lighter option. Sometimes it is even free. Leave that 3rd flashlight at home? FREE!!! But most gear upgrades are increasingly expensive as you get lighter but still demand top end performance. This tool helps you organize to make good decisions about whether, and how to spend on upgrades. There are times where very little money needs to be spent and significant weight can be shaved and other times where it will cost hundreds of dollars to shed mere ounces. This is where Lighterpack really shines. Right up top, there is a share button that copies a link to your list into your computer memory. There are many great online communities where gram weenies will happily scrutinize your every selection and offer their opinions on how improve every single one of them. If you have a 1 ounce tent, someone will link a tent that weights a mere .7 ounces and only costs $3000 more. “But dude, it’s 30% weight savings on that item!” You get the idea. It’s free advice and you can take or leave each piece of it as you see fit. Not all of the advice will fit your criteria and some of it will open your eyes to new brands, items and methods.
You can have multiple lists going at once, and I always do. I start scheming for a trip long before I take that trip, usually. So I enter in all my gear and supply needs for a proposed trip and then make changes if something changes like the season or maybe bear canister requirements, etc.
As my trip opportunities are pretty slim these days this is one of the most valuable things this tool provides other than the fine tuning I just talked about – super preparedness. When I get an opportunity to pull the trigger on a trip I can be ready in a very small amount of time. I can go from not prepared at all to ready in an hour or so. Completely and totally. That time will increase of course if I can’t find an item or didn’t properly clean something after my last usage but I’ve gotten a lot better about that. I swear. We’ll talk about gear cleaning another time, though.
That’s it for now. Use Lighterpack.com. It’s awesome.