Example gear lists

Nobody should buy one of these in a single order, and almost nobody does. The useful way to read a finished gear list is as a set of decisions rather than a shopping cart: what does this kit carry for shelter, and why that instead of the alternative, and what did it give up to afford the choice. The notes at the bottom of each page exist for exactly that, and they are the part worth reading twice.

Start by finding the list closest to the trips you actually take, then diff it against what you already own. The gear list builder loads any of these kits in one click, so you can swap in the tent you already have, delete what you will not carry, and watch base weight move as you go. That is a faster route to a real number than typing forty lines from a blank page.

The gap between the lists is more interesting than any one of them. The budget kit and the sub-10 lb kit are separated by roughly six pounds and several thousand dollars, and almost all of that difference sits in three items. That is the whole argument for attacking the Big Three first and ignoring the rest until they are sorted.

Two lists here argue in the opposite direction on purpose. The winter kit carries more, not less, because margin that is merely pleasant in summer is what keeps a trip survivable below freezing. The desert kit spends its ounces on water capacity and shade, because six litres of water outweighs every gear decision on the page.

A number is not a plan. Every weight here is a manufacturer's published figure, and published figures run optimistic often enough to matter. Weigh your own gear. Match your shelter and insulation to the conditions you will actually meet rather than to the total at the top of a page. Treat water, carry rain protection, and keep a way to call for help. None of those are places to save ounces, and no list on this site was built by cutting them.

Nobody should copy a gear list unchanged, including these. What a finished kit gives you is a working starting point where the interactions already make sense: the pad is warm enough for the quilt, the pack is framed enough for the load, and the fuel matches the resupply window. Change one of those and you often have to change another, which is the part a shopping list cannot tell you.

Four adjustments cover almost every real trip, and they should be made in this order.

The first row is the one people skip and it is the largest number in the table. Consumables are set by the trip rather than by your gear, and they routinely outweigh every gear decision combined. Six litres of water is 13 lb 4 oz. Five days of food is 7 lb 8 oz. Against those, the difference between a good shelter and an excellent one is a rounding error, which is exactly why the desert kit spends its ounces on carrying capacity and shade instead of on grams of gear.

Work the numbers rather than guessing at them. The food weight calculator converts calories per day into ounces at a calorie density you choose, the water carry calculator does the same for litres between sources, and the pack volume calculator checks that the result still fits. Then load the kit you started from into the gear list builder, which every buildout page links to directly, and edit it line by line against gear you already own.

What the grams per dollar column is for

Every buildout ranks its upgrade options by grams saved per dollar spent, computed from published weights and listed prices rather than asserted. Gear forums argue about upgrades in adjectives; a ratio is an argument. Anything above roughly 5 grams per dollar is excellent value in this hobby. Anything under about 1 gram per dollar is a purchase you make because you want it rather than because the arithmetic told you to, and that is a perfectly reasonable thing to do as long as you know which one you are doing.

Read the ratio with two cautions. It ranks by value, not by importance, so a cheap saving on a small item can top the list without changing how the pack feels. And it only ever compares gear we have verified, so a cottage item with no published price sits outside the table entirely. For the ordered reasoning, which is what to buy in what sequence rather than what is cheapest per gram, use the buying order guide, and run a shakedown on what you already own before buying anything at all. The cheapest weight on any gear list is the item you stop carrying, and it costs nothing.

Where these kits agree with each other

All six carry water treatment plus a way to deal with a failed filter, rain protection, insulation that works at the night low rather than the daytime high, a headlamp, a first aid and repair kit, and in five of six a satellite messenger. None of those were trimmed to make a headline number smaller, and none of them should be trimmed from your version either. Going ultralight must not mean going unprepared. A kit that hits a weight target by deleting margin is not a lighter kit, it is a shorter trip with a worse ending, and you are responsible for carrying shelter and insulation adequate to the conditions you will actually meet rather than the ones in the forecast.