I’ve been emptying my pack onto the kitchen counter on Sunday nights for twenty years, which is a habit my wife finds funny and I find necessary. The pile has gotten smaller. What’s left has earned it.
This is a day kit, the one that goes with me whether I’m trout fishing the Pemi, cutting dead ash on the woodlot, or following a logging road in the rain to nowhere in particular. Overnight trips get a different list.
What stays
A knife with a fixed blade and a four-inch blade, nothing fancy. Mine’s a basic Scandi-grind utility knife I bought at a hardware store in Berlin for thirty-some dollars. It cuts kindling, splits shims, guts the occasional brook trout, and opens feed bags. I’ve owned the expensive ones. This is the one I carry.
A lighter and a second lighter. Two is one, one is none, and that rule out of the backpacking forums turned out to be true. The second lighter lives in a chest pocket, away from the first.
A rain shell. The real kind, with taped seams and a hood. New Hampshire weather changes its mind twice before lunch, and a soaked cotton sweatshirt at 3 p.m. in October is a genuine problem. I’ve been the guy walking out shivering. It only takes once.
A headlamp. I use it more than any other item on this list, mostly for things I didn’t plan: gutting a deer at 4:45 in November, walking out from the back forty after the fish bit at dusk, finding the truck key in the leaf litter.
A compass and a paper map of whatever township I’m in. My phone has a map too, and a compass, and a battery that reads 40 percent at the trailhead and dies in the cold. The paper map has never once asked me for a charge.
Food I’d actually eat cold: a couple of sandwiches, an apple, some chocolate. A candy bar in the bottom of the pack in November is worth more than an elaborate freeze-dried dinner on a day hike. Half a sandwich saved me on the ridge north of Carter Notch once and I think about it every time I pack.
A lighter kit of first aid: athletic tape, a few bandages, ibuprofen, a folded ten-dollar bill for when I get back to civilization without my wallet. Moleskin, because a hot spot at mile two becomes a real injury at mile seven.
Duct tape, about two feet of it wrapped around a pencil. It fixes pack straps, torn waders, split paddle grips, and a hundred things that would otherwise end the day.
What people carry and shouldn’t
The big survival knife. The eighteen-inch serrated thing with the hollow handle and the compass in the pommel, the one that looks decisive in the store. It’s heavy, it’s clumsy, and the hollow-handle ones break at the tang exactly when you’d need them. Every task a person actually does in the woods on a day trip, a four-inch blade does better. The giant knife goes in the truck and stays there, which is dead weight you carried four miles for a photograph.
I carried one for years. A friend gave me a used one when I was nineteen and I felt equipped. What it mostly did was bruise my hip through the pack and make me tired. The day I swapped it for a plain Mora-style utility knife was the day my pack dropped two pounds and my hips stopped complaining.
The rest of the list is about comfort and margin. The knife argument is about honesty. Bring the tool you use, leave the tool that’s for the movie version of the day.
One more thing that stays in the pack and costs nothing: my phone, off, in a zip bag. It’s for emergencies. It’s also for the photograph at the end of the day.