Equipment used on our 2024 Appalachian Trail Hike
Utopia is in the water and mostly ready to take off on an adventure, but we need to take care of some things over the next month and will be staying put in Brunswick. Therefore, over the next several weeks, our blog posts will summarize gear we used on our Appalachian Hike.
Regardless of how much research and preparation is made prior to a hike, it is likely that a backpacker will modify gear during a long hike. Most of the equipment that we started out with in April 2024 was purchased in 2019, prior to our Mt. Katahdin backpack trip. Along the way we removed gear that we realized that we could get away without, or we replaced other items with lighter weight gear, and sometimes we simply just added to our load.
Since we basically hike together, we shared a lot of equipment. These include our tent, first aid supplies, privy kit, cook set, electronics charging equipment, Garmin InReach and other smaller miscellaneous items. Even with shared equipment our load may have been on the heavy side with Jimmy carrying around 35 pounds and Sondra at 30 pounds both carrying a basic load of food and water.
We snapped a photo of our gear the a few days before starting this hike. It appears to be missing our sleeping bags. Unfortunately we did not get a photo of our gear at the end of our hike. It all has been either disbursed for use on the boat, tossed, or placed deep into a locker within the boat. The photo gives a general idea of the amount of we stuff we crammed into our backpacks.
The items Sondra started with is shown on the left, and Jimmy's starting load on the right.
Information about our hike, along with a listing of our posts by state can be found on our Appalachian Trail Hike page.
This overview of our gear is broken into a five blog posts:
The Big Three (tent, sleep system & packs)
Equipment for Food & Water
Basic Gear, Emergency & Medical Aids
Personal Items
Clothing
The Big Three
The hiking community often refers to the gear for tenting or hammocking, the sleep system, and the backpacks as The Big Three. These are vital pieces of equipment for a backpacking trip and can affect a hikers comfort dramatically. So it makes sense to start off covering these items.
Tent System
Big Agnes Copper Spur HV UL2 tent & Big Agnes tent pad (3.4 lbs)
With the two of us hiking together, we opted for a two person tent to be shared between the both of us. We purchased our tent in 2019 and added the tent pad in 2020 to provide extra protection under the tent. Overall, we are happy with this tent. The tent held up pretty well, although the tape along the seams began to unravel this did not appear to cause any leaking. During heavy rain events water would pool on the top of the rainfly and eventually leak through the fabric and into the middle of the tent. This was corrected by stuffing some of our raingear between the tent poles and the rainfly.
Future Considerations: Weight could be shaved by purchasing a newer tent and pad, but with this being a shared item it was fine for us. Since the tent is showing some age, it probably should be replaced on a future hike. If Sondra did a solo hike, then she is definitely interested in an upgrade to reduce weight.
Patched up tent --- Jimmy sitting in vestibule --- Sleeping bag drying after rainstorm
Sleep Systems
Jimmy (4.6 lbs):
Big Agnes Lone Ranger sleeping bag
Big Agnes Air Core sleeping pad
Inflatable pillow
Sondra (4 lbs):
Big Agnes Roxy Ann 15 sleeping bag
Big Agnes Q Core sleeping pad replaced with Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XTherm NXT sleeping pad
Cocoon silk liner
Jimmy started out with an inflatable pillow purchased either in 2019 or 2020, that began to leak after a few weeks on trail, so he ordered a new one. That new pillow was damaged shortly after purchasing by contact with DEET. In New York he found a pillow in a hiker box that served him for the remainder of the hike.
Sondra needed to make changes to her sleeping pad in order to provide better warmth. Her Big Agnes Q Core was lighter weight than Jimmy’s Air Core but had a lower R-value. They swapped pads to give her more warmth, and later she found a partial foam pad in a hiker box that she placed under the inflatable pad. After the DEET episode, the Q Core was losing air through the night, so in Massachusetts she upgraded to Therm-a-Rest NeoAir XTherm NXT which greatly improved her sleep comfort without an increase in weight. With this purchase, Jimmy got his old inflatable pad back, we tossed out the Q Core, and we converted the foam pad into sit pads. Sondra loved her silk liner and used it the entire hike.
Future Considerations:
Sondra is debating whether or not to add an inflatable pillow to her gear on future trips. She used spare clothing in a bag as a pillow. During cold weather, she wore more clothes, and her lumpy pillow shrank in size.
In future trips we would like to replace our sleeping bags. Both are rated at around 15 degrees, but we were pretty cold when temperatures got below 45 degrees Fahrenheit. There are warmer and lighter weight options out there, although they are not inexpensive.
Backpacks
Jimmy: Osprey Aether 60 (4.4 lbs)
Sondra: Osprey Aura S 50 (4.2 lbs)
Both packs are shown while worn and the extra sleeping pad is shown in the middle photo
These packs were purchased in 2019. Although considered heavy, they are generally comfortable. During the first two weeks we both had a fair amount of discomfort as we got used to carrying our loads. Throughout the entire hike, we made a lot of adjustments to the straps throughout the day. Jimmy’s pack surprisingly survived an encounter with an open bottle of DEET in New Jersey. The packs began to smell offensively towards the end of the hike. Perhaps a deep cleaning three months into the hike should of been done. Needless to say, the packs had to be cleaned once the hike was over so that we could continue to use them for provisioning and laundry from the boat.
Future Considerations: Sondra might spring for a lighter-weight pack before her next long backpacking trip.
That's it for this week (24-28). The next gear review post (24-49) will cover equipment needed for food and water.
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