The Four Things That Almost Made My San Juan Loadout
A pre-trip shakedown on the living-room floor — the near-misses in my backpacking loadout, what the scale said about each one, and the insurance-versus-fear test.
There’s a high-country loop in the San Juans on my calendar — four days, a couple of passes above 12,000 feet, and if the timing holds, an afternoon of high-alpine cutthroat fishing in the middle of it. The trip hasn’t happened yet. The shakedown has.
Because here’s the thing I keep telling people and finally did myself: the shakedown you run before the trip, on the living-room floor, with a kitchen scale and no optimism — that’s where the pack gets honest. I built the loadout in the app, laid every item out on the floor, and interrogated the marginal ones. Feelings lie and a kitchen scale doesn’t.
Four items put up a real fight. Here’s the argument each one made, and where it landed.
The luxury I keep defending: the camp chair
Let’s start with the big one. The Helinox Chair Zero Highback — 28.8 ounces, $126 of aircraft-grade aluminum and ripstop, and by far the single heaviest “luxury” item in my closet.
The case for it is real: comfort in camp matters. Sleep quality, recovery, the simple morale of a good seat after a brutal descent — none of that is nothing. But 28.8 ounces is nearly two pounds. That’s a full extra day of food. That’s the difference between my pack feeling like a companion and feeling like a punishment on the last climb out. And the projection is that I’d spend maybe 90 minutes a night actually sitting in it — most of that around a fire I could lean against a log for. The chair has to justify two pounds carried across every single mile so I can be comfortable during the fraction of the day I’m not moving or sleeping.
The most dangerous gear in your pack isn’t the stuff you never touch. It’s the stuff you’d touch just enough to justify carrying it forever.
Verdict for this trip: it stays home. I reserve the right to feel wistful about it at sunset on night two. That tension is the whole point.
The one I hope I never use: bear spray
Sabre Frontiersman bear spray — 10.6 ounces that will ride in a side pocket the entire trip and, with any luck, never come out of the holster.
This is the important asterisk on the whole shakedown conversation, and I want to be really clear about it: not all unused gear is dead weight. Some of it is insurance. The bear spray is the cleanest example I own. Its entire value proposition is that you carry it precisely so that on the one afternoon a curious bruin decides your ramen smells interesting, you are not standing there empty-handed, negotiating.
You don’t get to know in advance which trip is the one. So you pay the 10.6-ounce premium every trip, forever, and you hope to waste it. A canister that comes home unused isn’t a failure of packing discipline — it’s the outcome you were paying for.
The trick is being strict about which items actually belong in this category. Bear spray, a real first-aid kit, an emergency bivy, a way to signal — those are insurance. The line I try to hold: insurance protects against something with genuine consequences and no in-the-field substitute. Everything else that’s “just in case” deserves a much harder look. Which brings me to the item I’m least proud of.
The one that was just fear: a second fly rod
I almost packed a second fly rod. A McFarland GTX 486 — a gorgeous little glass 4-weight, 3.3 ounces of it — “just in case” something happened to my primary.
Now, 3.3 ounces is almost nothing — that’s the seductive part. It’s so light that “why not” feels like a reasonable answer. But “why not” is exactly the mindset that turns a light pack into a heavy one, one harmless little 3.3-ounce decision at a time. The accounting: a backup rod covers a failure mode that basically doesn’t happen to a well-cared-for rod on a four-day trip. If my primary snapped, I’d be disappointed — but I’d fish runs by hand, or spend more time above the water with a camera. That’s a recoverable problem, not a genuine-consequence one. That’s fear, not insurance. If you want the actual framework I use to sort those from each other, it’s the backbone of my ultralight backpacking gear guide.
The backup rod is the item the shakedown exists to catch. Cut.
The one I’m genuinely unsure about: camp shoes
Last up: Crocs as camp shoes. 12.98 ounces for the pair.
The case: around camp they’d give my trail runners a chance to dry, handle shallow creek crossings, and spare me the specific misery of putting soggy shoes back on at 6 a.m. The case against: almost 13 ounces is real weight for what is, functionally, foot comfort.
And I land somewhere genuinely in the middle. On a warmer, drier loop I’d leave them home without a second thought and let my trail runners do double duty. On this one — with cold creek crossings and wet mornings at altitude in the forecast — dry feet at camp may pay for the weight in recovery and blister prevention. If I ever want to make that argument rigorously instead of by vibes, it’s a cost-per-use calculation: ounces carried, divided by how much the thing actually improves the trip.
I don’t have a clean verdict on the Crocs. That’s fine. Not every item resolves before the trip. But at least they’re going in the pack on purpose instead of out of habit — and they’re first on the list for the post-trip audit.
Adding up the “almost” pile
Let’s do the drama, because the number is the point:
- Chair Zero Highback — 28.8 oz
- Bear spray — 10.6 oz
- Backup fly rod — 3.3 oz
- Camp Crocs — 12.98 oz
That’s 55.68 ounces — nearly three and a half pounds of gear that all sounded reasonable in the garage. The pre-trip ruling: the bear spray stays (insurance — I’ll gladly haul it home unused a hundred times), the Crocs ride probation, and the chair and the backup rod stay home. Two of the four cut, before a single mile got paid for them.
This is the real lesson, and it’s why I obsess over the distinction between worn and carried. The weight on your feet and body barely registers; the weight in your pack is the number that grinds you down. That number is your base weight, and it’s the single most useful thing you can know about your kit. If you’ve never actually weighed your setup — not guessed, weighed — that’s the highest-leverage hour you’ll spend before your next trip. I log every item and let the app do the sorting, so I can see exactly what’s insurance, what’s luxury, and what’s just fear I was about to carry uphill.
When the trip happens, the post-trip version of this shakedown runs on the garage floor — two piles, used it and didn’t — and this post gets its follow-up as a proper field report. Until then, this is the plan, labeled as one.
Dump your pack on the floor before you go. Make the argument for every item out loud. Weigh the losers.