rucksacking

From Trafalgar Square to Cape Town: Thru-hiking Europe and Africa

Rucksackers everywhere should salute the Australian husband and wife team of Gary and Paula Constant. On the 1^st of August, 2004, they left London from Trafalgar square to walk to Cape Town in South Africa -- a distance of over 10,500 miles. The walk will run in three stages: from London to Morocco, Morocco to Sudan, and Sudan to Cape Town. They're currently in Portugal, which sounds nice. The trip must have taken incredible palnning skills, but we were brough up short by this line on their site: "After a great deal of thought, it has been agreed the weight that can be comfortably carried on a daily basis by each person should not exceed 30kilos, and ideally would be closer to 20. Including food." (Note to Americans: that's 44 to 66 pounds)(Note to the Constants: you could go a lot lighter than that! Please, get rid of that needlessly heavy Coleman tent!)

Constanttrek Home [Constanttrek.com]
Constanttrek Blog [constanttrek.typepad.com]

The Lightweight Manifesto

A lot of people consider Ray Jardine's "Beyond Backpacking" to be the Bible of lightweight backpacking, and in some ways they're right. Jardine's book is the ground text for rucksacking, and many of the innovations he came up with are still the best we've got. But that doesn't mean every word is golden. Have you ever read the section on food? How about Ray's preoccupation with dry socks? Also, the book is long, and life is short.

If we had to choose one prime text for rucksacking, it'd have to be Lightweight Backpacking 101, put together in August of 2001 by the people responsible for Backpacking Light. True to lightweight backpacking form, it's also a lot shorter than Jardine's book, and gets to the essential points quickly.

Lightweight Backpacking 101 [Backpacking Light]

ORs: Original Rucksackers

Sure, we think going light is the way to go, but it's not like we came up with the idea ourselves. There's a long tradition of rucksacking, dated back to...we don't know, a long time ago. There are any number of people who could be entered into the Rucksacking Hall of Fame, but here are four that immediately jump to mind:

• John Muir

  Naturalist, enviormentalist, rucksackist. Muir would often head out for weeks in the wild with little more than a big wool coat and a loaf of bread.

• Earl Shaffer

  Shaffer was the first man to hike the entire length of the Appalachian Trail (in 1948), and did it more than once during his lifetime, most recently in 1998 -- at the age of 79.

• Grandma Gatewood

  Gatewood (who died in 1973) first hiked the Appalachian Trail when she was 67 -- without a tent, backpack, sleeping bag, or map.

• Ray Jardine

Jardine has the distinction of being the only living rucksacker on the list. Whatever we could write about him has already probably been said somewhere else. Let's just call him a rucksacking pioneer, shall we?

Mr. Ray Himself

Originally published back in 1998, this lengthy profile of Ray Jardine reveals a lot more about the man behind the Ray Way. It's somehow amazing to think that the Jardine's took their last long-distance hike a decade ago.