'Light, Cheap, Durable - Choose Two'

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 ;-)