Ultralight Overnight Climb 101

After recently completing a 4 night climb with a 24L pack, I got some questions. 

• How did you find enough room for camping gear + rope and climb items? 
• What about food?
• Why pack so small?

Truth is it's fairly easy to climb most Cascades routes in summer using a small (20-30L) pack, while still packing 10 essentials, rock pro and some overnight luxuries. For multi-night, off-trail trips, it can be a huge comfort and even open up new creative approach and route options. This is a quick primer on how.

Gear You'll Need

•  A 3kg kitchen scale
• A 50lb pack scale
• 20-30L pack and gear - or a list
• Extra stuff sacks in various sizes

Ultralight Motives

Curiously, convincing climbers to pack more lightly is a challenge. Unlike thru-hikers, climbers seem to superficially relish weighty packs. It's popular to understate the pack impact or ascribe it as a beneficial training effect. For climbers however, a heavy pack is actually unsafe and can have deleterious health consequences. Consider the advantages of the ultralight pack:

• Reduces injury. Lower pack weight minimizes destructive impact on your joints and feet. This is very important for those disposed to plantar fascioitis, or who are already somewhat heavily built and place a lot of force on their limbs.
• Safer. A smaller pack eases the most dangerous activity the alpinist faces: unroped scrambling. An ultralight pack stays well-balanced on approaches, scrambles and downclimbs
• Declutters. If you only carry the important items, it's easier to find them. It's easier to track and stay abreast of fewer items, making them less likely to be misplaced or lost en route.
• Flexibility - An ultralight overnight pack gives the climber an option to be creative and summit peaks en route as carryovers. This is HUGE. The climber is less confined to trails or out-and-backs. By avoiding ascending climbers on the same route, descents can be safer. It is usually trivial to bypass "bottlenecks" which impede heavy packers. 
• Purer experience - Yvon Chouinard wrote that gadgetry separates us from nature, and diminishes rather than enhances the adventure.
• More Summits - For peak baggers, you can spend more time sending and less time waddling along overburdened on a trail. For the rest of us, we can find extra time to integrate other pursuits into our climbing: foraging, hunting, botany and geology, and trailside conversations.

Ultralight Philosophy

To achieve our ultralight (sub-10lbs base weight) climbing pack, we're going to pursue 4 major vectors. In most discussions, we'll use grams since they're easier to compare to kilos, than ounces to lbs.

Substitution - This is the easiest and most intuitive vector for progress. A classic 60cm Black Diamond Raven ice axe weighs 1 kg. A Corsa Nanotech axe weighs 250g, and fulfills the same requirements on a basic glacier climb. You've just saved 800g without giving up anything!

Omission - Some items we carry are definitely optional. As you pack, sort optional items into a separate pile, and review them for later. Omitting safety gear usually means you must cancel immediately if the climb is trending into unexpected territory. Any commitments must be taken with caution, if at all.

Repurposing - We can often make a single item serve many purposes, allowing us to leave item one at home.

Reduce Volume - Usually the backpack is the heaviest single item we carry. By minimizing volume, we can bring a smaller pack which is more versatile and itself lighter.

Minimize Carried Water - Generally, American athletes drink water ("hydrate") during activities. Historically, this was believed to be important to maintain good performance, and jumpstarted new products such as Camelbak reservoirs and Gatorade. Recently however, researchers have (re)discovered that hourly water intake does not necessarily improve athletic performance. 

As proof, ultrarunners in other nations typically drink water at dawn, run for hundreds of miles in the hot sun, then drink at dusk. These athletes lose over 3% of their body mass (over 2 liters) in water. yet their body maintains hydrostasis just fine and keeps moving. It seems "hydration" is more a cultural idiom of Western athletics, rather than a genuine need. And for the alpine climber who must carry their water, such hourly "hydration" is decidedly optional.

For alpinists, we're usually at a base camp with water at dawn, climbing in breezy conditions during the day, then again with access to water at dusk. We could carry excess water, and drink and excrete it during the day, or just let our bodies maintain hydrostasis naturally.

Optimize for the Main Chance - Some climbers overfocus on rescue scenarios, to the detriment of their actual climb. This is sometimes called "playing to lose" - they're perfectly optimized for catastrophe, but too overburdened to actually summit. As an exercise, we suggest studying the Principle of Maximum Utility from decision theory and plugging in some rescue scenarios. Our goal is to survive disasters, not to thrive in them. 

As an example, consider climbing Emmons Glacier of Rainier in two three-man teams in July. You own two double pulleys (DMM Revolver Rig) of 226g each. With this tool, you can haul a teammate from a crevasse single-handed via 7:1, in only 5 minutes. Ideal gear right?

The "problem" here is your chances of falling in a crevasse are vanishingly unlikely - hundreds of teams summit every day without a crevasse fall. And even in this cornercase, the chances of requiring a "haul" are rare indeed - most NPS rangers have never even heard of a non-SAR haul being employed on Rainier by necessity. 

Even if the haul were required, your second team could likely be a better option than building an intricate pulley system, which could overstress anchors and imperil the team. So instead of the two Rig pulleys (502g total) we might bring one RollNLock pulley (80g), to cover the rare haul system scenario just in case.

The summary here is: thrive on ascent, but survive catastrophe. Don't optimize for a rare disaster, while making your send a weary survival experience.

Step One: Weight Everything

Begin by weighting your gear (or looking it up online) and plugging in the values to a spreadsheet.

- Sample trip: Ptarmigan Traverse with 13lb pack