It was mountain biking guru Keith Bontrager who once came up with
the memorable line: 'Cheap, light, strong - pick two'. His point, and
this was during a period when mountain biking components were getting
stupidly feathery to the point of random catastrophic ailure, was
that strong, light things are invariably also expensive.
I'm sure you can work the rest out for yourself, but it's starting
to feel like the ultra-lightweight bandwagon has reached the point
where you could legitimately paraphrase Bontrager and say, as far as
outdoor gear goes, 'Cheap, light, durable - pick two.'
Recalibrate Your Expectations...
The
problem is that while kit is getting lighter and lighter right across
the range, many of us haven't recalibrated our expectations to match.
The other month, someone on the OM forum complained that their
Brasher Supalite GTX boots had lasted barely two years of regular
use.
That's outrageous, my old mountain boots, he said, lasted 15 years
and are still going strong. Except of course the Supalites probably
weigh, at around 1100 grammes, half of what a traditional full
leather mountain walking boot would scale. And that's because they
use wafer-thin Pittards leather uppers, lightweight EVA foam padding
in the mid-sole and an outsole made from soft, light leather.
All those thing make the Supalite, well, super light - though
ironically quite weighty compared to, say. an Inov8 Roclite 370. But
they also make it less durable. Everyday wear will collapse the EVA's
cushioning, the lightweight rubber sole will wear faster and
eventually cumulative abrasion will simply wear through the uppers,
particularly if you're clumsy or insist on stomping through scree.
The same, unsurprisingly, is true of lightweight tent
groundsheets, and featherweight clothing fabrics. Sadly it goes with
the territory - thin face fabrics with no reinforcement are more
likely to take a terminal hammering from your pack straps. And
lightweight packs themselves are more likely to wear and hole if you
insist on treating them like a traditional pack.
Light + Tough = Expensive
The bottom line is that even though there are light, strong
fabrics around, they're also very expensive and even then, they
probably won't have the sort of durability you expect from more
traditional, full-weight kit if you abuse them consistently.
The pay-off for extreme lightness is generally, though not always,
reduced durability. That's not to say ultra-lightweight kit is a bad
thing - anyone who's slashed the weight of their pack or gambolled
happily across the hills, in a pair of lightweight trail shoes, will
appreciate just how it can enhance your experience of the hills - but
that it comes at a price.
It makes demands of us. And in particular it asks us both to
re-align our expectations of its durability and toughness and to use
our kit more considerately and skillfully to maximise its life and
effectiveness.
There's some good news here though. No-one says you have to buy
ultra-light or ultra-heavy. For the average hill or mountain walker,
the real blessing of the arrival of lightweight kit from the likes of
GoLite and Montane is that weights right across the kit spectrum have
gone down. Whereas a full-on mountain shell jacket used to weigh
close to 1000 grammes, now it's more likely between 600 and 700g.
Similarly there are plenty of 'middleweight' boots out there,
that give you some of the benefits of gramme slashing, but without
some of the downsides, so choose carefully and you can have your
lightweight cake and eat it - or most of it anyway... Still, you
could always use those crumbs as extra padding under your lightweight
sleep mat ;-)
Tim Ahlstrom
