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Ultralight hiking implies that you have to get rid of excess weight and travel light. It means reducing the weight of the contents of your Coleman Chikapin X65 Internal Pack to the barest essentials, while still adequately providing for necessities.
The benefits of lightweight hiking are not only limited to saving weight, but also include the speed that you can travel on foot with a lighter load. Traveling light will cause you to perspire less, which is an advantage on long dry stretches. Since you use less energy on the march, you will get by with less food supplies and, hence, less weight to carry. This only means that you will be able to cover and see more, or you can be at campsite sooner and get more time for looking around the camping area.
Another advantage to ultralight backpacking includes a body which is not overly stressed. Backpacking hiking enthusiasts sometimes take on too much weight which can microscopically tear the thick connective tissue leading from the heel to the toe at the arch. This can lead to bone spurs (sharp projections of new bone) and unbearable pain when the spurs strike sensitive tissue, and also cause inflammation of the connective tissue.
If you carry loads of around fifty pounds on your long hiking trips, the likelihood of suffering the inflammation and developing bone spurs will greatly increase. Ultralight hiking will help prevent this condition from developing. If you keep your total load down, you can possibly walk more miles every day, on feet that remain healthy. You may still feel some soreness at the end of a long day of walking but after a good night’s rest, your feet should be strong and ready to hit the trail again.
Among all the parts of the body, it is the lower back that bears the burdensome weight of a loaded hiking pack. When your spine endures a long period of heavy pressure, it poses a danger for the spinal discs that serve to separate one vertebra from another: they could slip or rupture. You can prevent this from occurring through ultralight hiking. Other parts of your body that will be protected by switching to the ultralight mode of hiking are your joints, hips, knees and ankles.
There are disadvantages, however, to ultralight hiking. If you are in an adverse condition while in the wilderness and you do not have the hiking equipment and hiking gear, the chance of survival might be less. In fact, some ultralight long-distance hikers have died because of lack of enough equipment used for hiking. For instance, if you bring a tarp instead of your Coleman Exponent TylTM X2 Tent, you might not survive the condition of a sudden change of weather in the mountains. You must have now realized that ultralight hiking, in some climates and hiking conditions, is simply not appropriate. Most experienced hikers would only use ultralight strategies in moderate environments. It is wise to lighten your load in stages and in steps. This way, you will still have the convenience of ultralight hiking but without compromising safety. |
