I’ll have a Royale with cheese
Unexpected benefit of putting together your own hiking gear list: You will learn the metric system. Because trying to add up a column of Imperial weights or volumes will make any rational person want to stab all of Britain.
For instance: I have a 1L Nalgene water bottle and a 3L pack reservoir. How much does 4L of water weigh? Yes, Canadian friends, I actually typed that query into Google, because I am a dumb-ass American. As I imagine any small child in most parts of the world knows: 4 liters of water weighs 4 kilograms, because 1L = 1kg, because metric units are actually based on the dimensions of something sensible.
How many pounds is 4kg? At this point, I don’t even care. Fill up that bag and the bottle all the way, and then lift them up. That’s what lifting 4 kilograms feels like. It’s like lifting four full Nalgene bottles. I lift a Nalgene bottle to my lips a hundred times a day. My hands know what a kilo weighs better than my mind does.
After a week of meticulously weighing bits of backpacking gear with my kitchen scale and plunking them into a spreadsheet, I’m already better at guessing weights in grams than I ever was with ounces. This watch? 20 grams. a light rain jacket? 300g. a heavy rain jacket? 600g. a pair of boots? about a kilogram. my backpack, empty? 1800g. (Bonus round: all of my gear put together, not counting food & water? About 16 kg.)
Later on, I was wondering what that 1L Nalgene would weigh if I filled it with methylated alcohol fuel instead of water, since alcohol is lighter. A quick web search revealed that methyl alcohol has a density of 785 kg/cubic meter. “Huh,” I said, “I wonder what that is in grams/liter? Let’s see, a kg is 1000g, and the volume of a cubic meter is… 1000 liters exactly?… so… divide both sides by 1000 and…” ::facepalm:: It’s 785 g/L.
So, okay, I’m learning. Just… slowly.
Anyway! It’s been beautiful and sunny all week, which of course meant that the weather immediately went back to being cold and gloomtastic again this weekend. Third weekend in a row that NW Washington has pulled that crap on me, but summer is in the air.
Tonight I’m packing and repacking, shaving excess grams off the [gear list]. Tomorrow I’m going out for an overnighter in the Chuckanuts, rain or no rain. Only forty days until July– forty??– but I’m finally starting to feel prepared.
